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silveradeptLet us begin this entry with a commentary on the changing visibility of women in animation, where women are eventually getting to higher positions and responsibilities in addition to the often stellar and strong work they do as ink and paint animators, cel creators, and much of the day-to-day work that makes studios like Ghibli so well-known and beloved for their productions. And, of course, women in careers is also a following on from academic institutions that finally allowed women to sit their examinations.
And perhaps is even more following on from the work being done to make sure that people know about the contributions of African women to their societies, and that many old societies in Africa had reading, writing, mathematical knowledge, and were otherwise the opposite of the colonial narrative that wanted to paint them as barbarous and uncivilized so they could be enslaved without disturbing the colonizer's conscience.
Brian Wilson, best known as a member of the Beach Boys and a pioneer of a specific style of pop that came from it, has left the world at 82 years of age. The details of his personal life, as well as some of the more experimental turns and albums that Wilson did, are a stark contrast to the sounds and the easy commercial co-option that has happened to the Beach Boys music and sound. We are all more complex than we appear on the surface.
We might start the places that examine things like the actions of governments with a poem where someone complains why the poems are always so dark, which may not be what the person asking actually meant to ask, and gets an answer to the perhaps more relevant question. Which I pair with a piece that is about doing what you can in the face of your opposition, and being willing to admit that what you can is not necessarily what the story protagonist version of yourself would be doing.
A data broker owned by many of the U.S.'s largest airlines has been selling flight records for U.S. flights to the Homeland Security folks, and in the contract, explicitly forbids anyone on the government side from revealing they have been buying this data from the airlines themselves. I can understand why such a secrecy clause would be implemented, because people tend to get upset when they find out that a business they are engaging with has been selling their data without their consent, and to people who have a long track record of malice with that data.
Since they could not bully all the schools they wanted into becoming mouthpieces and factories for people espousing their view of the world, the administration chose to restrict the capacity for U.S. embassies and consulates abroad to interview and proceed with student visa applications, citing an excuse that they need to more heavily scrutinize the social media posts and presence of students before proceeding with interviews again. The timing on this interview pause is carefully calculated to have the most deleterious effects on colleges and universities that have strong traditions of international student bodies, so whatever justification has been officially stated, it should be wiped away and replaced with "we want to intimidate colleges and universities into being favorable to us and make them give us power and influence over them in exchange for their international students." Which is unsurprisingly straight out of the playbook of the people who believed they had to bring the colleges and universities of Germany under their control, so they wouldn't have academics and intellectuals fighting them as they sought to expel and disempower everyone they thought of as Jewish.
The kidnapping squads continued to try and reach their artifically-imposed quotas, this time going after workers at restaurants, and then using flashbang and smoke grenades to disperse the people who arrived to try and prevent the kidnapping by people who refused to identify themselves to the media or others. They've also gone against high school students, people they even admit are not dangerous, but they need to make quota on. And they then blame policies that say "we do not cooperate with kidnappers" and "sanctuary cities" as the reason why they have to go out and kidnap people and find whatever excuse they can for doing so, as if things would be just better for everyone if we all agreed that everyone should allow kidnappings and tell the government who needs to be kidnapped.
Their eagerness to try and get people kidnapped means that when someone forges a letter to try and get a witness against him deported before he can testify in the trial, the kidnappers tout their successes at finding someone to get rid of, and then it comes out that they've been fooled by a forgery.
The kidnappers threatened to arrest the children of the person they wanted to arrest, with the threat that a mother and her young child would be separated, so as to get the person they wanted to kidnap to leave her home, where she was safe from them. Once the person left the home, the kidnappers kidnapped her, instead, losing all interest in the bait they had successfully used. The city spokesperson then claims that the local police deployed were to prevent violent actions by civilians against the kidnappers. Given what was happening, the people doing the kidnapping, if they were as unidentified and unidentifiable as usually happens, probably received the response of a community interested in protecting their friends and neighbors against being kidnapped.
The kidnappers are being assisted by highway patrol sobriety stops, where they are allowed to find anyone they believe looks too brown to be here legally and kidnap them. The kidnappers are being assisted through the sharing of private data about who is currently on government-provided health insurance, so they can effectively target people who are going to the doctor for medical care, like they're targeting people who are going to the courthouse for other legal matters.
As revenge for being forced to admit and demonstrate they knew where he was all the time and could get him back to the United States at any time desired, the administration has filed charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man they kidnapped and sent to a foreign country to be tortured, claiming that he engaged in human trafficking. This is very much a "we are trying to justify ourselves by claiming that he really was a bad man by prosecuting him on something" situation. One of the prosecutors in the office that filed the charges resigned, with the official reason being "concerns" that the case was a political revenge prosecution rather than anything that has to do with the criminal conduct and criminal conspiracy that the charges allege. (Honestly, at this point, even if they had an ironclad case for this allegation, the fact that the government deported him by mistake, then claimed they couldn't find him or bring him back at all, then had to actually do both of those things, would make any defense attorney have a very strong case that the prosecution was the government trying to save face over its own blunders and is motivated by everything except wanting to see justice done.)
The kidnappers, and the people giving them their orders, definitely believe they are above any form of accountability and that those attempting to exercise oversight over them are illegitimate. A senator that attempted to ask the Homeland Security spokesmodel a question was tackled, handcuffed, and then moved out of a room, and the spokesmodel and others claimed they didn't know who the Senator was and that everyone acted appropriately because the Senator was being threatening to them. The Senator points out that if this is how persons with oversight responsibility are treated by this administration, then it leaves little to the imagination of how they treat the ordinary persons they disappear without cause or bothering with appropriate orders. And also, the spokesmodel claimed that they were there to "liberate" the city of Los Angeles from its elected leadership, because that leadership continues to resist the narrative that the city is having out-of-control rioting, looting, and crime, when the actual area where such things are alleged to have happened is very small, the protest was primarily peaceful in the face of provocation by police, and media outlets are doing their best to parrot the provocateurs and copaganda. That mission is assisted when driverless cars from the Waymo company, whose camera footage is being requested by cops who think of them more as mobile surveillance devices, are being summoned to locations, graffiti'd, and then lit on fire, so that the media has something nice and inflamed to focus cameras on, but because of that "mobile surveillance" attitude, and the fact that the cars themselves will be nothing more than property damage if destroyed, suggests that it's not lawlessness, but specific deliberate action being taken to get these cars and use them as messaging options, which again pushes back against the idea of L.A. in riots.
All the same, the military is now directly involved in the detention of civilians, instead of that supposedly being the exclusive domain of the police and/or National Guard in almost all situations.
A House of Representatives member from New Jersey has been indicted for assault while performing oversight duties of a detention facility in her state in the face of the people there choosing to resist and attack the oversight group.
The current administrator is putting on a military parade on June 14, but the public opinion is divided about whether or not it's a good idea (it's not) and whether the money spent on the parade is a good idea (also no.) In the article, supporters of the parade think of it as honoring the military and their service, rather than as a testament to the ego of the administrator and his desire to be someone who can command a military parade so that he looks like a strong, dictatorial, and authoritarian figure.
The turnout for the parade was extremely dismal, and therefore its now safe to say that it was a failure, the whole idea was an ego-fluffing exercise, and to give more scrutiny into the sponsors, merchants, and others who gave the money and got the shout-outs from the screens and stage for it.
On the same day, millions of people turned out across the country to protest the administrator and his dictatorial aims, aspirations, and actions, with the same message across the country - "No Kings."
The current administration continues to believe that complications of a pregnancy no longer require emergency room doctors to provide life-saving abortion care if there are abortion bans in that state, which is once again proving the lie that the people responsible for these bans and who proclaim themselves to be in favor of life are instead more in favor of punishing women for having sex with people who aren't them.
The majority of state legislators in Louisiana disqualified themselves from being fit for public office by passing a ban on so-called "chemtrails," conspiracy-theory related items that believe the contrails of plans flying through the air are supposedly weather-affecting (or people-affecting) chemical releases. It used to be that state legislatures and localities were where you would find such matters, but as time goes on, it seems more foolish people attain higher offices.
The state of Texas, in an attempt to prevent students from organizing and demonstrating, has a bill being debated that would ban the ability of students to engage in First Amendment-protected activity with each other between 10pm and 8am. Which is laughably overbroad and would be walloped with prejudice at the first court challenge, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans passed it and the governor signed it anyway.
Foolishness is never limited to only the most conservative of states, however. The University of Michigan has been hiring private contractors to follow and report on the activities of student activists and protestors, especially those decrying the violence and destruction in Gaza.
Minnesota police are on the lookout for someone who shot and killed the Democratic-Farm-Labor party's leader while dressed as a police officer and driving a car that had been made up to look like a police vehicle. Which is to say, it's now possible to kit yourself out in such a way that people might mistake a person who intends to do their own violence as someone who has been given the power of the State's violence. And, like those who have been given the power of the State's violence, the killer seemed very interested in both lawmakers and in those who might have been protesting the lawless actions of the current administration as targets.
A zine that tells us a little about the long history of alliance between librarians and cops, and the ways that librarians have often used cops as a way of getting people they don't want in the library to go out.
A primer on Generative AI devices and their interaction with libraries, from the correct perspective - get this slop out of my profession.
The Texas Library Association has quietly disappeared an extremely effective framework for librarians to manage their collections based on Continuous Review of the collection to find things that need to be weeded and things that need to be added. Texas is one of the states that is actively pushing for untrained politicians to control what appears on library shelves, and has obtained a decision from the Fifth Circuit proclaiming that library book collections are government speech and therefore all library staff are empowered to make their collections exactly as they choose, without any oversight or means of redress. (Of course, they want that ruling so they can impose upon library workers what the collection shall be without redress or oversight.) The Internet Archive has the tool, so the most recent edition can be downloaded, where you can see recommendations to remove from the collection things that are misinformation, outdated material, or that use language that people of this time would rightly classify as offensive to certain groups. (The Fifth Circuit quoted from the guide and its recommendations in the majority opinion and claimed that changing a collection in such a way is "viewpoint discrimination" and not permitted. Which is certainly a thing to say when Texas is insisting that lists of books to be removed that are all mysteriously about queer people, queer relationships, or the plight of black and brown folks in a racist society couldn't possibly be "viewpoint discrimination," but is some other thing entirely.)
After suffering five years of harassment from someone engaging in libel and slander against her, a school librarian has decided to sue her harasser. The harasser has counter-sued, as well as suing other employees of the school, who say they are preventing her from exercising her parental right to control what all students are reading and viewing. Her attorney, in the suit, commits further libelous actions against the librarian by repeating the most common accusations against librarians when someone takes leave of reality. Furthermore, the suit accuses the librarian of "desensitizing children to DEI, SEL, sex, social justice issues, alternate sex and gender ideologies, and liberal political ideology[.]" Which is clearly using all kinds of buzzwords, because desensitizing children to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as Social-Emotional Learning is precisely what these harassers want to have happen, so they can have children who never get the opportunity to think that something might be unjust, wrong, or based in animus about a person instead of their actions. One should hope that the librarian prevails, and quickly, but there's a lot of judicial appointees and electeds out there who are willing to provide shield and cover for libel and slander under the First Amendment, so we'll have to see what happens.
In technology, Before it could be destroyed by companies insisting you pay them exorbitant fees to file federal taxes, the IRS open-sourced the DirectFile software they had piloted to make it much easier for people to file. You can examine the code and logic at the IRS DirectFile Github repository, and from there, presumably, there should be a way of working with tax professionals and technology professionals to stand up a version of this software for each tax year beyond 2024. It certainly would be nice if someone made an importable module or similar for the logic of each tax year, so that someone could choose how they wanted to run a DirectFile application, locally or otherwise. There is a bit on the README that says some functions were removed or rewritten because they called functions or accessed servers that were not public-available or public-allowed, so there may have to be a little bit of work done on the source to produce a fully working application.
A prominently featured model using ChatGPT as an engine intends to drive as many men as it can deeply into the incel culture by insisting that the men who interact with it are subhuman and cannot possibly succeed without various manoshpere interventions, like pick-up artistry and expensive cosmetic surgery, and deploying racist reasoning why being white is better for picking up women than any other race. This seems like a bit more of a concentrated effort to get bad takes out into the world using chatbots, rather than letting the chatbots do their own terrible things. Still, lots of people interested in using a tool for their own ends, right?
Instructors are having a difficult time doing their work and finding ways to get students to do their own authentic work, in the era of the text generating chatbots, and many of them feel they are losing or having to resort to extreme tactics to get the students to not use the chatbots for their assignments.
The problem, of course, is that too many people are treating this glorified chatbot like it has intelligence, and that it has a greater intelligence than humans, and that intelligence itself can be quantified in some manner. That quantification has historically been in the service of racism about white people being the smartest, and now it seems to be engaged in the service of telling humans that machines are more intelligent than them and that the rich people that designed them are smarter still than the machines, and therefore, as the smartest and fittest, they should get all the resources and the rest of us should get nothing. Trusting your own judgment on LLMS and chatbots is a mistake, because most of us do not have the capacity to run rigorous scientific experiments on the cognitive hazards that LLMs use to make themselves appear authoritative, relatable, and effective. Which makes it even less heartening that (an) Ohio State University is launching a program designed to ensure all their undergraduate students are exposed to and expected to work with chatbots and LLMs as an integral part of their coursework, under the guise of getting "fluency" with those things.
In contrast, we have the Human Words Project, which is both website and book, but generally is about commitment to making all of your words 100% human-generated. (And also, the book is going to wax poetic about a typewriter, a device specifically meant for making words that has no other functions.) And, from there, a refusal to cede any punctuation marks or other elements to LLMs or to think of them solely as indications that the text in question is LLM-generated. Language shapes, evolves, changes, and all the rest of that, yes, and so the use of more esoteric punctuation and vocabulary will always get you the designation of being weird, but so much of what we remember and use and keep close to us is the esoteric.
Last out for this post, highly-decorated, multi-gold medal winner, multiply-Olympic champion, and first to perform several maneuvers that now bear her name in the Gymastics Code of Points gymnast Simone Biles read undecorated, grievance-profiting, Fox News-supplicating, and all-around mediocre swimmer Riley Gaines for filth when Gaines posted about a softball team with a trans girl on it winning a championship. Gaines attempted to clap back by calling Biles a "male apologist," but I couldn't hear it very well over the sound of all that hardware clanking. Biles did eventually post something clarifying her comments as being about competitive equity and inclusivity and not singling out individual athletes for public scrutiny, but it has the feel of "people concerned about my brand made me do this 'clarification' " rather than a genuine change of position from Biles. Because that clarification makes it sound like Gaines might have had a point, and that's objectively untrue.
A libertarian-leaning, eye-catching eyesore has been bought, along with the land under it, by a local Native tribe, so hopefully the billboard will have a better sense of humor, or a better sense of politics, or both.
The National Hockey League's candidates for the Stanley Pup, thirty-two rescue dogs (one for each team in the NHL) looking for adoption, and all of who have great facts and team material available for them. Think Puppy Bowl, but hockey.
And the deliberate decision to lean into cringe in the Murderbot television series and buck the idea of people who never have human moments as protagonists. Combined with the performance of gender by SecUnit, and how that performance becomes meaningful once it's a choice instead of a requirement.
(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.)
And perhaps is even more following on from the work being done to make sure that people know about the contributions of African women to their societies, and that many old societies in Africa had reading, writing, mathematical knowledge, and were otherwise the opposite of the colonial narrative that wanted to paint them as barbarous and uncivilized so they could be enslaved without disturbing the colonizer's conscience.
Brian Wilson, best known as a member of the Beach Boys and a pioneer of a specific style of pop that came from it, has left the world at 82 years of age. The details of his personal life, as well as some of the more experimental turns and albums that Wilson did, are a stark contrast to the sounds and the easy commercial co-option that has happened to the Beach Boys music and sound. We are all more complex than we appear on the surface.
We might start the places that examine things like the actions of governments with a poem where someone complains why the poems are always so dark, which may not be what the person asking actually meant to ask, and gets an answer to the perhaps more relevant question. Which I pair with a piece that is about doing what you can in the face of your opposition, and being willing to admit that what you can is not necessarily what the story protagonist version of yourself would be doing.
A data broker owned by many of the U.S.'s largest airlines has been selling flight records for U.S. flights to the Homeland Security folks, and in the contract, explicitly forbids anyone on the government side from revealing they have been buying this data from the airlines themselves. I can understand why such a secrecy clause would be implemented, because people tend to get upset when they find out that a business they are engaging with has been selling their data without their consent, and to people who have a long track record of malice with that data.
Since they could not bully all the schools they wanted into becoming mouthpieces and factories for people espousing their view of the world, the administration chose to restrict the capacity for U.S. embassies and consulates abroad to interview and proceed with student visa applications, citing an excuse that they need to more heavily scrutinize the social media posts and presence of students before proceeding with interviews again. The timing on this interview pause is carefully calculated to have the most deleterious effects on colleges and universities that have strong traditions of international student bodies, so whatever justification has been officially stated, it should be wiped away and replaced with "we want to intimidate colleges and universities into being favorable to us and make them give us power and influence over them in exchange for their international students." Which is unsurprisingly straight out of the playbook of the people who believed they had to bring the colleges and universities of Germany under their control, so they wouldn't have academics and intellectuals fighting them as they sought to expel and disempower everyone they thought of as Jewish.
The kidnapping squads continued to try and reach their artifically-imposed quotas, this time going after workers at restaurants, and then using flashbang and smoke grenades to disperse the people who arrived to try and prevent the kidnapping by people who refused to identify themselves to the media or others. They've also gone against high school students, people they even admit are not dangerous, but they need to make quota on. And they then blame policies that say "we do not cooperate with kidnappers" and "sanctuary cities" as the reason why they have to go out and kidnap people and find whatever excuse they can for doing so, as if things would be just better for everyone if we all agreed that everyone should allow kidnappings and tell the government who needs to be kidnapped.
Their eagerness to try and get people kidnapped means that when someone forges a letter to try and get a witness against him deported before he can testify in the trial, the kidnappers tout their successes at finding someone to get rid of, and then it comes out that they've been fooled by a forgery.
The kidnappers threatened to arrest the children of the person they wanted to arrest, with the threat that a mother and her young child would be separated, so as to get the person they wanted to kidnap to leave her home, where she was safe from them. Once the person left the home, the kidnappers kidnapped her, instead, losing all interest in the bait they had successfully used. The city spokesperson then claims that the local police deployed were to prevent violent actions by civilians against the kidnappers. Given what was happening, the people doing the kidnapping, if they were as unidentified and unidentifiable as usually happens, probably received the response of a community interested in protecting their friends and neighbors against being kidnapped.
The kidnappers are being assisted by highway patrol sobriety stops, where they are allowed to find anyone they believe looks too brown to be here legally and kidnap them. The kidnappers are being assisted through the sharing of private data about who is currently on government-provided health insurance, so they can effectively target people who are going to the doctor for medical care, like they're targeting people who are going to the courthouse for other legal matters.
As revenge for being forced to admit and demonstrate they knew where he was all the time and could get him back to the United States at any time desired, the administration has filed charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man they kidnapped and sent to a foreign country to be tortured, claiming that he engaged in human trafficking. This is very much a "we are trying to justify ourselves by claiming that he really was a bad man by prosecuting him on something" situation. One of the prosecutors in the office that filed the charges resigned, with the official reason being "concerns" that the case was a political revenge prosecution rather than anything that has to do with the criminal conduct and criminal conspiracy that the charges allege. (Honestly, at this point, even if they had an ironclad case for this allegation, the fact that the government deported him by mistake, then claimed they couldn't find him or bring him back at all, then had to actually do both of those things, would make any defense attorney have a very strong case that the prosecution was the government trying to save face over its own blunders and is motivated by everything except wanting to see justice done.)
The kidnappers, and the people giving them their orders, definitely believe they are above any form of accountability and that those attempting to exercise oversight over them are illegitimate. A senator that attempted to ask the Homeland Security spokesmodel a question was tackled, handcuffed, and then moved out of a room, and the spokesmodel and others claimed they didn't know who the Senator was and that everyone acted appropriately because the Senator was being threatening to them. The Senator points out that if this is how persons with oversight responsibility are treated by this administration, then it leaves little to the imagination of how they treat the ordinary persons they disappear without cause or bothering with appropriate orders. And also, the spokesmodel claimed that they were there to "liberate" the city of Los Angeles from its elected leadership, because that leadership continues to resist the narrative that the city is having out-of-control rioting, looting, and crime, when the actual area where such things are alleged to have happened is very small, the protest was primarily peaceful in the face of provocation by police, and media outlets are doing their best to parrot the provocateurs and copaganda. That mission is assisted when driverless cars from the Waymo company, whose camera footage is being requested by cops who think of them more as mobile surveillance devices, are being summoned to locations, graffiti'd, and then lit on fire, so that the media has something nice and inflamed to focus cameras on, but because of that "mobile surveillance" attitude, and the fact that the cars themselves will be nothing more than property damage if destroyed, suggests that it's not lawlessness, but specific deliberate action being taken to get these cars and use them as messaging options, which again pushes back against the idea of L.A. in riots.
All the same, the military is now directly involved in the detention of civilians, instead of that supposedly being the exclusive domain of the police and/or National Guard in almost all situations.
A House of Representatives member from New Jersey has been indicted for assault while performing oversight duties of a detention facility in her state in the face of the people there choosing to resist and attack the oversight group.
The current administrator is putting on a military parade on June 14, but the public opinion is divided about whether or not it's a good idea (it's not) and whether the money spent on the parade is a good idea (also no.) In the article, supporters of the parade think of it as honoring the military and their service, rather than as a testament to the ego of the administrator and his desire to be someone who can command a military parade so that he looks like a strong, dictatorial, and authoritarian figure.
The turnout for the parade was extremely dismal, and therefore its now safe to say that it was a failure, the whole idea was an ego-fluffing exercise, and to give more scrutiny into the sponsors, merchants, and others who gave the money and got the shout-outs from the screens and stage for it.
On the same day, millions of people turned out across the country to protest the administrator and his dictatorial aims, aspirations, and actions, with the same message across the country - "No Kings."
The current administration continues to believe that complications of a pregnancy no longer require emergency room doctors to provide life-saving abortion care if there are abortion bans in that state, which is once again proving the lie that the people responsible for these bans and who proclaim themselves to be in favor of life are instead more in favor of punishing women for having sex with people who aren't them.
The majority of state legislators in Louisiana disqualified themselves from being fit for public office by passing a ban on so-called "chemtrails," conspiracy-theory related items that believe the contrails of plans flying through the air are supposedly weather-affecting (or people-affecting) chemical releases. It used to be that state legislatures and localities were where you would find such matters, but as time goes on, it seems more foolish people attain higher offices.
The state of Texas, in an attempt to prevent students from organizing and demonstrating, has a bill being debated that would ban the ability of students to engage in First Amendment-protected activity with each other between 10pm and 8am. Which is laughably overbroad and would be walloped with prejudice at the first court challenge, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Republicans passed it and the governor signed it anyway.
Foolishness is never limited to only the most conservative of states, however. The University of Michigan has been hiring private contractors to follow and report on the activities of student activists and protestors, especially those decrying the violence and destruction in Gaza.
Minnesota police are on the lookout for someone who shot and killed the Democratic-Farm-Labor party's leader while dressed as a police officer and driving a car that had been made up to look like a police vehicle. Which is to say, it's now possible to kit yourself out in such a way that people might mistake a person who intends to do their own violence as someone who has been given the power of the State's violence. And, like those who have been given the power of the State's violence, the killer seemed very interested in both lawmakers and in those who might have been protesting the lawless actions of the current administration as targets.
A zine that tells us a little about the long history of alliance between librarians and cops, and the ways that librarians have often used cops as a way of getting people they don't want in the library to go out.
A primer on Generative AI devices and their interaction with libraries, from the correct perspective - get this slop out of my profession.
The Texas Library Association has quietly disappeared an extremely effective framework for librarians to manage their collections based on Continuous Review of the collection to find things that need to be weeded and things that need to be added. Texas is one of the states that is actively pushing for untrained politicians to control what appears on library shelves, and has obtained a decision from the Fifth Circuit proclaiming that library book collections are government speech and therefore all library staff are empowered to make their collections exactly as they choose, without any oversight or means of redress. (Of course, they want that ruling so they can impose upon library workers what the collection shall be without redress or oversight.) The Internet Archive has the tool, so the most recent edition can be downloaded, where you can see recommendations to remove from the collection things that are misinformation, outdated material, or that use language that people of this time would rightly classify as offensive to certain groups. (The Fifth Circuit quoted from the guide and its recommendations in the majority opinion and claimed that changing a collection in such a way is "viewpoint discrimination" and not permitted. Which is certainly a thing to say when Texas is insisting that lists of books to be removed that are all mysteriously about queer people, queer relationships, or the plight of black and brown folks in a racist society couldn't possibly be "viewpoint discrimination," but is some other thing entirely.)
After suffering five years of harassment from someone engaging in libel and slander against her, a school librarian has decided to sue her harasser. The harasser has counter-sued, as well as suing other employees of the school, who say they are preventing her from exercising her parental right to control what all students are reading and viewing. Her attorney, in the suit, commits further libelous actions against the librarian by repeating the most common accusations against librarians when someone takes leave of reality. Furthermore, the suit accuses the librarian of "desensitizing children to DEI, SEL, sex, social justice issues, alternate sex and gender ideologies, and liberal political ideology[.]" Which is clearly using all kinds of buzzwords, because desensitizing children to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, as well as Social-Emotional Learning is precisely what these harassers want to have happen, so they can have children who never get the opportunity to think that something might be unjust, wrong, or based in animus about a person instead of their actions. One should hope that the librarian prevails, and quickly, but there's a lot of judicial appointees and electeds out there who are willing to provide shield and cover for libel and slander under the First Amendment, so we'll have to see what happens.
In technology, Before it could be destroyed by companies insisting you pay them exorbitant fees to file federal taxes, the IRS open-sourced the DirectFile software they had piloted to make it much easier for people to file. You can examine the code and logic at the IRS DirectFile Github repository, and from there, presumably, there should be a way of working with tax professionals and technology professionals to stand up a version of this software for each tax year beyond 2024. It certainly would be nice if someone made an importable module or similar for the logic of each tax year, so that someone could choose how they wanted to run a DirectFile application, locally or otherwise. There is a bit on the README that says some functions were removed or rewritten because they called functions or accessed servers that were not public-available or public-allowed, so there may have to be a little bit of work done on the source to produce a fully working application.
A prominently featured model using ChatGPT as an engine intends to drive as many men as it can deeply into the incel culture by insisting that the men who interact with it are subhuman and cannot possibly succeed without various manoshpere interventions, like pick-up artistry and expensive cosmetic surgery, and deploying racist reasoning why being white is better for picking up women than any other race. This seems like a bit more of a concentrated effort to get bad takes out into the world using chatbots, rather than letting the chatbots do their own terrible things. Still, lots of people interested in using a tool for their own ends, right?
Instructors are having a difficult time doing their work and finding ways to get students to do their own authentic work, in the era of the text generating chatbots, and many of them feel they are losing or having to resort to extreme tactics to get the students to not use the chatbots for their assignments.
The problem, of course, is that too many people are treating this glorified chatbot like it has intelligence, and that it has a greater intelligence than humans, and that intelligence itself can be quantified in some manner. That quantification has historically been in the service of racism about white people being the smartest, and now it seems to be engaged in the service of telling humans that machines are more intelligent than them and that the rich people that designed them are smarter still than the machines, and therefore, as the smartest and fittest, they should get all the resources and the rest of us should get nothing. Trusting your own judgment on LLMS and chatbots is a mistake, because most of us do not have the capacity to run rigorous scientific experiments on the cognitive hazards that LLMs use to make themselves appear authoritative, relatable, and effective. Which makes it even less heartening that (an) Ohio State University is launching a program designed to ensure all their undergraduate students are exposed to and expected to work with chatbots and LLMs as an integral part of their coursework, under the guise of getting "fluency" with those things.
In contrast, we have the Human Words Project, which is both website and book, but generally is about commitment to making all of your words 100% human-generated. (And also, the book is going to wax poetic about a typewriter, a device specifically meant for making words that has no other functions.) And, from there, a refusal to cede any punctuation marks or other elements to LLMs or to think of them solely as indications that the text in question is LLM-generated. Language shapes, evolves, changes, and all the rest of that, yes, and so the use of more esoteric punctuation and vocabulary will always get you the designation of being weird, but so much of what we remember and use and keep close to us is the esoteric.
Last out for this post, highly-decorated, multi-gold medal winner, multiply-Olympic champion, and first to perform several maneuvers that now bear her name in the Gymastics Code of Points gymnast Simone Biles read undecorated, grievance-profiting, Fox News-supplicating, and all-around mediocre swimmer Riley Gaines for filth when Gaines posted about a softball team with a trans girl on it winning a championship. Gaines attempted to clap back by calling Biles a "male apologist," but I couldn't hear it very well over the sound of all that hardware clanking. Biles did eventually post something clarifying her comments as being about competitive equity and inclusivity and not singling out individual athletes for public scrutiny, but it has the feel of "people concerned about my brand made me do this 'clarification' " rather than a genuine change of position from Biles. Because that clarification makes it sound like Gaines might have had a point, and that's objectively untrue.
A libertarian-leaning, eye-catching eyesore has been bought, along with the land under it, by a local Native tribe, so hopefully the billboard will have a better sense of humor, or a better sense of politics, or both.
The National Hockey League's candidates for the Stanley Pup, thirty-two rescue dogs (one for each team in the NHL) looking for adoption, and all of who have great facts and team material available for them. Think Puppy Bowl, but hockey.
And the deliberate decision to lean into cringe in the Murderbot television series and buck the idea of people who never have human moments as protagonists. Combined with the performance of gender by SecUnit, and how that performance becomes meaningful once it's a choice instead of a requirement.
(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: 2025-06-16 06:05 pm (UTC)The sanewashing by the news media is getting unbearable.
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Date: 2025-06-17 04:18 pm (UTC)