We're over the halfway line - Late June 02025

[silveradept]

Let's begin this entry with One Hundred reasons Not To Die, which starts with oranges and moves through the ways that communities come together in the face of disasters and help each other. Which stands in stark contrast to the ways that having more wealth than could possibly be earned or expended in one lifetime (at least, not without seriously screwing over everyone and everything you can) has altered the way that the richest think of how they should be allowed to rule without fetters, that their ideas are always the smartest, and the rest of us should be beholden to them for everything so that we can't stop them or tell them no.

Ask most people who go through a university program where there's at least some amount of sport, and they'll tell you that the sports parts of the university are almost always the things that get the most money and what they want the fastest. A non-tenured professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder doesn't make nearly as much as the football head coach, and very little of the money that the football program makes ever finds its way back to the academics, nor does it seem that the football program (or other programs) can be decalred to be self-sufficient and their budget allocations moved over to other places that could desperately use it, like salaries for those doing the teaching. This is the perpetual issue with universities that have well-known athletics programs - they bring in a fair amount of revenue, but a lot of that revenue then gets spent improving the athletics portions and the rest of the university is left to figure out how to get their own funding. (My university was at least fairly explicit that a lot of the revenue from their "revenue-generating" sports is used to ensure scolarships and other materials for the "non-revenue-generating sports," which means that the football program often provides the operating budget for much of the women's sports available at the university, which is not a terrible thing to do with that cash. It also helps that it was a university with a fair number of alumnae who have gone on to prestigious jobs, so there's a lot of regular donations and endowments that they can use for capital and operating expenses. They still don't pay everyone on the teaching side enough, though.)

Harvard University employed someone to find descendants of slaves who had a history with Harvard's founders and prominent people. For doing the job admirably, thoroughly, and well, Harvard fired him, because he was finding far too many people with the associations than what the university wanted to acknowledge. They were willing to peek beneath the hood, but not to fully look at what was found there.

Those who pay attention to the Pentagon Pizza Index may have had an inkling that something big was about to happen, as pizza orders from the places around the facility spiked in anticipation of Israel's decision to attack Iran. After that attack happened, The U.S. decided they were going to assist, dropping powerful bombs on alleged nuclear enrichment facilities in Iran, even though the administrator was supposedly against furhter entanglements in the Middle East. In return for their actions, Iran fired missiles at a U.S. military base in Qatar, having first communicated that the attack was going to happen so there would be minimal chance of civilian casualties. And because they wanted it to be seen as a proportionate response to the attack from the United States.


Police officers, even ones that are theoretically forbidden from assisting other agencies with their activities, are still more than happy to share surveillance or run surveillance for others, including for those entities that they're supposed to be forbidden from sharing with, and using tools those entities do not have contracts with or access to. And nobody, of course, is bothering to get a warrant from a judge before asking for this surveillance data. There's an acronym that gets used here to great effect, and the emphasis would be on All.

When you insist that all trans women are men and have to do men things, then you get women swimming in male swimming costume, even though an organizer supposedly has the right to disqualify a woman who doesn't have her breasts covered. You also get foolishness like issuing apologies to people who claim to have been offended that a trans woman was allowed to use the women's facilities.

The current U.S. administration has removed funding to ensure that when young queer people call the Suicide Prevention Hotline, they receive someone who is knowledgeable and experienced with queer issues. And in their statement, the organization pulling the funding referred to not siloing "LGB+ youth services," using a construction favored by people who want to erase queer and trans people and detach them from the greater umbrella as somehow different and unnatural. Despite the known high rate in which young queer people need these services or use them to keep themselves alive at some of the very lowest points of their life. Other places, such as the Trevor Project, will maintain their own trans-inclusive services and lifelines, but the national line will no longer have people with specialized experience providing timely assistance from someone who knows.

The Supreme Court of the United States decided that it's perfectly legal to refuse to treat a transgender child to get them toward the the gender identity and body they wish, when those authorities might do exactly the same thing for a cisgender child who wants the same treatment to have the gender identity and body they wish, especially if that body wants to develop on a much quicker time scale than the child or their parents wants them to. The difference is almost certainly that one child wants to stay cisgender, the other does not, and therefore the one that the state wants to bully (for their own reasons, whatever they may be) may not access the treatments.

"At-will" employment allows extremists who freak out completely at the mere idea that a library would have a book about a trans child to successfully get the librarian fired for offending their delicate sensibilities. Get yourself a union.

The conservative majority of the Supreme Court of the United States granted the ability of parents to remove their children from any class where there might be curricular material that conflicts with their religious views, giving those parents unlimited power to remove their children from any aspect of public education that might conflict with their own religious views, whether those religious views deny scientific consensus, or whether there's a book in the curriculum that has a queer person in it. If education consistent with religious values is of such importance to those parents, they can choose to expend the tuition to take their children to religious schools, or try to find some way of getting their child into a religious education they can afford. The conservative majority here says very loudly that children are the property of their parents and the public schooling system is not allowed to do, say, or show anything to the property that the parent doesn't want done, said, or shown. (There's a malicious compliance element here that could be deployed, to make sure that all the curricular materials for all of the courses contain forbidden topics. Regrettably, one of the good ways to help children who are being opted-out of their education is to provide them with materials and opportunities to experience the thing that they are missing out on in class in other situations. Those parents that demand this control are also probably trying very hard to make sure the school library doesn't contain anything that might offend their religious beliefs as well.)

Because of the attitude of the highest court toward enforcing and ensuring the executive actually follows the law, persons in the administration who should be allowing for gender marker changes on passport applications ahve instead, continued to delay and hold such things indefinitely, without approving them as they should. When confronted on the matter, at least one of those people said that they do not answer to the courts, which is only something you can say aloud if you believe that there will be nobody to enforce the decrees of the court on the people who should be enforced upon.

There are a lot of people who are urging people who can get pregnant to avoid contraceptive pills. More than a few of them are doing so because they want to peddle anti-science, anti-feminist, anti-women messages.

The people in charge of health in the States are operating on an agenda where people become healthier as a whole because those who are sick and disabled are left to die, rather than using the tools available to improve their quality of life and/or make the world accessible to them so they can live fulfilling lives.

The Supreme Court majority in the United States also gave the green light to have states remove organizations like Planned Parenthood from being able to accept Medicaid at all because Planned Parenthood allows for abortion care. And the decision was written in such a way as to give states the ability to remove anyone from being able to accept Medicaid for whatever service it is that the state objects to the provision of.

Because the current administartion in the U.S. is extremely science-hostile, the European Union is hoping to recruit U.S. scientists with the promise of being adequately funded and not having their research fucked with. Japan is doing the same, hoping to get talent from the United States to do research there.

Virtual Private Network and proxy usage is likely to skyrocket in Texas, because the conservative majority of the Supreme Court decided that Texas's law requiring any website that provides more than a certain percentage of "sexually suggestive" content that is "harmful to children" verify the age of any Texas visitors, usually by having them submit a government identification for verification. I look forward to seeing the changes in network traffic, and also, I look forward to seeing how this is supposed to happen, and which sites are the ones that get the greatest amount of scrutiny from the Texas government. (And also, which sites they're going to obviously miss, either because it's under their percentages, or because there's nothing obvious about the site that suggests it would have age-restricted material on it until you know where to look.)

The first woman governor of Iowa has decided that police departments in the state may not intentionally attempt to recruit, hire, or retain women as police officers, which, according to the descriptions in the article, will only make a highly sexist place worse to work at, and probably worse still in how they respond to civilians. What might be the most useful part of such a law might be the way that it engenders attitudes that are more police-hostile than friendly, although I think a fair amount of what's happening with the kidnappings is helping as well, as more and more people find out that the kidnappings are not targeted to the people they think of as deserving of being kidnapped, but are indiscriminate and target the people they think of as good.

The federal kidnapping squad arrested and detained the comptroller of New York City (also a candidate for the mayor of the city) when he attempted to assert to them that they needed more than their own say-so to kidnap the man he was escorting, and they refused to produce any order justifying their kidnapping to him. The kidnappers arrested him for assaulting them and impeding their kidnapping. They still did not produce any kind of warrant or other document claiming the legal authority to kidnap the person being escorted. In any other administration, this kind of behavior would at least warrant censure from the top against anyone who did such things so brazenly. It should warrant the entire dissolution of the bureau involved in such repeated disregard for the requirements of law and procedure and the ejection of the political officials that are supposed to be overseeing them and ensuring their compliance.

Instead, a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States said that it's perfectly legal for the kidnappers to kidnap someone and then send them to a completely different country without any attempt at due process, getting legal representation, or any thought of what dangers might await the person in another country. This is also a decision made despite the multiple times the administrator had to have it spelled out in very clear language what was required of them, because they kept deliberately ignoring or claiming that various orders that applied to them didn't apply to them, or didn't spell out exactly what was requested of them. The Supreme Court's majority then followed that abdication with an decision proclaiming that federal courts do not have the power to enjoin executive actions on a nationwide level, but instead only in their own remits and/or only for the people who are named in the lawsuit. Which is mostly trying to allow for as much lawless action as possible and to make it as difficult as possible for someone to successfully prevent lawless action from happening everywhere.

Furthermore, the agency in charge of the kidnappers and running the detention facilities where the kidnapped are stored continues to claim that the people charged with their oversight, who are legally permitted to make surprise unnanounced inspections of their facilities, cannot make surprise unnanounced inspections of their facilities. Presumably because they want to ensure they're going to have the Potemkin villages properly raised and painted before they let anyone in to see them. Which, of course, would defeat the purpose of a surprise inspection. In this specific case, the usual framing is, "Well, if you don't have anything to hide, then you won't try to stop surprise inspections." Given how much these kidnappers have to hide and justify and otherwise obfuscate, someone seeing the real thing would be highly detrimental to them.

The Slacktivist has a thought about what corporate procedure might be deployed to defeat kidnappers coming into your location: the Code Adam procedure used to try and prevent the kidnapping of children. Most places of work that serve the public are already trained on it, and it wouldn't be that much of an expansion to include the procedure as "what to do if people claiming to be agents of the government enter your space to kidnap someone inside."

Mahmoud Khalil, a citizen of the United States kidnapped by those who wished to silence his protected speech on how the United States was assisting Israel in genocidal actions in the Gaza strip, has finally been returned to his wife and newborn child after more than one hundred days. The kidnappers did not deign to charge him with some violation of the law, and Khalil had obtained permanent resident alien status, so immigration visas could not be so easily revoked for him as they may have been for others.

Those who are engaging in the kidnappings, since they have not been chastised, but instead encouraged, are beginning to sound and behave like what they are doing is somehow laudable and that they should be bragging about it to each other. This attitude gets encouraged when the person who should be advising them of restraint and of making sure that they treat detainees humanely is instead proclaiming how much he likes the idea of inhumane conditions for those kidnapped.

Two predominantly Latino cities in California have canceled all of their 4 July celebrations, on the logic that large gatherings of people being targeted by kidnappers will almost certainly attract the attention of kidnappers to perform mass kidnappings on them.

The kidnappers, and the person in charge of them, are now turning their attention toward trying to remove the citizenship of persons already naturalized so they can be deported, and to do such matters in the civil court, so that the government does not have to provide legal counsel to the person so impacted. And they also are working on trying to get it declared that the plain language of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States[,]" only means certain people are afforded the benefits of citizenship, despite being born in the United States, or in places subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

Medical providers for the National Health Service in the UK have expressed concerns that patients are filming them and their procedures for the social media clout, as opposed to reasons like "to ensure that if there is mistreatment, there is video evidence of it." Which says a fair amount about what people are looking for in broadcasting their lives to the universe.

Looking for people who nearly destroyed a piece of very fragile art by sitting in it, likely by accident.

Drawings of the hospital and its doctors, with specific decisions that make it look more like scuplpture and that choose to emphasize light and brightness in the pictures.

In technology, someone's idea of symbiosisware, a piece of software meant for the user who programs it, and which evolves in turn with the user/programmer.

Assembling the pieces of large Roman artworks to see what they have.

The Vera C Rubin observatory is up and running, and it is taking some very beautiful pictures of the cosmos.

Jessamyn West's part of a talk that explains that users have always been at war with their computers, becuase UI/UX designers almost always side with the idea that their purpose is to make the company money, rather than assist the user in doing things with their computers. At least commercially - in non-commercial software, it often instead becomes "well, I can use it, why should I bother with you?" for things that are definitely not symbiosisware.

Toy company Mattel has announced a partnership with OpenAI toward the development of a toy marketed to children powered by a confabulation machine and its models. People who study children and their development are not pleased with this possibility, and the toy company claims that it will only provide positive experiences through the chatbot-powered toys. Which is not a provable claim, nor should anyone believe that it will be possible, and therefore, Mattel's toy should be reated as if it will replicate the biases of its training data, confabulate, or be vulnerable to being replaced or influenced by other models that may provide a much less pleasant experience. And that's still assuming the toys themselves can't be hacked or otherwise influenced before they're given to their intended recipients (or afterward.)

A judge has ruled that using a corpus of copyrighted works to train an LLM is sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use, but such material must be obtained legally, which would grate many techbros terribly about having to acquire and pay for the material they want to train their LLMs on, rather than using the most expedient manner possible, regardless of the legality of the material available.

The Oracle-owned Java platform should be abandoned as swiftly as possible, as Oracle's recent changes in licensing suggest they intend to see rent for each employee of an organization licensing their product, rather than each user of the product. And the new licensing costs are apparently more expensive than the previous ones, since they're more expansive, as well. Seems like a good idea to forego Java wherever possible.

The person accused of killing a Minnestoa lawmaker had in their notebook a listing of people search sites that would have made it trivially easy to obtain things like home addresses, phone numbers, and other data that would have made it easy to find and harass (and attack) any stalker or attacker's preferred target. Such people search sites are very common, and generally use all kinds of data broker information bought and sold to compile their dossiers, or compiled from public records requests. With the ease in which companies collect and then sell the personal data of their customers, usually without the ability of the customer to opt-out, or trying to make it as difficult as possible to opt-out of each potential use, it wouldn't be that difficult for anyone with a little bit of spare cash to find just about everything they needed to dox, stalk, harass, or kill someone.

Scammers have taken advantage of a willingness to pass parameters along by search engines to get their malicious "support" phone number to show up on a page that belongs to a legitimate company, mostly by buying ad results for various companies and places, getting placed there, and then directing someone to a search results page on the legitimate company's site using their malicious phone number as the search string. If you knew those results were advertisements, you could probably avoid the malicious results, but because ad companies that happen to run the occasional search engine are very hungry for people to both buy and click on ads, they do their best to make the ads look like legitimate results so that you can't easily tell the difference between a real result and a paid one. Yet another way in which advertising online has done great damage to the usefulness of the Internet.,

The University of North Carolina library IT team lays out what it needed to do (in a general way, rather than specifics) to prevent scrapers trying to build datasets for their LLMs DDoSing library resources, like the catalog, which first involved a lot of knocking out traffic that seemed to be clearly bot-related, then knocking out IP ranges that remained, and then from there deploying adaptive tools to spot and block the robot traffic. None of the bots, of course, identified themselves appropriately, or used a single IP address, or did anything that could be considered good crawling behavior. (If they did, then the LLMs wouldn't get their data nearly quickly enough, and they'd actually respect being blocked or told to go away or being rate-limited. And, as above, the people who build these scrapers for LLMs, anyway, seem to believe they don't have to bother with whatever the peons want, they can just take whatever and at whatever rate they desire.) This complete lack of respect for the places being scraped is causing problems and headaches for those entities that find themselves being scraped repeatedly and at rates that hurt their infrastructure. Some of those entities don't want to put their content behind login walls or other authentication measures because they want the material to be freely available for use, citation, and analysis, but they also have to deal with bot swarms coming to scrape them in the rudest way possible.

It has been only a few days since someone leaked restricted material on the forums for a game that prides itself on accuracy to prove a point about how that accuracy was not being modeled correctly. This is the ninth such categorized leak, and I'm sure the game creators and the runners of the forums are tired at the regularity in which restricted material appears in their space.

Out of this post, McSweeney's says "Happy Father's Day, fools" with a post about just what it takes to be a dad.

And the need to remember that you don't know the gender of the person in front of you unless they've told you, which means a lot of habits that people have about gendering people based on things that don't actually say what their gender is need to be unlearned, both in person and in things like describing the contents of photos or other archival content.

(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.)