It's all still here - Late July 02025
Aug. 3rd, 2025 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with The COVID-Safe Scouts' research repository, for all your deep dive desires or need to have research to hand when someone around you is trying to tell you that things are either over or not dangerous when it comes to interacting with the variations of SARS-CoV-2.
Also, A claimed nearly-100% effective drug against HIV infection, lenacapavir, is going to market, with deals for generics and no-profit manufacture in several countries around the world, instead of only as an expensive brand name. Twice-yearly injections appears to be the schedule for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and this could be a breakthrough that can finally put down the HIV/AIDS epidemic. What a day that will be, if we can get that virus to die off.
The 2025 version of the Gender Census is running, so if you are a person for whom the label of "man" or "woman" doesn't always apply at all times and in all cases, you are encouraged to take the survey.
The Archive of Our Own Ship Top 100 for 2025 is out, with secondary units involving top 100 F/F ships and the All Time Top 100 with this year's data added to it. Of note is an F/F ship breaking the top 5 for this year. (Also of note is a few comments complaining about how "Latino" is an ethnicity, not a race, and that it's overbroad, which are accurate things. It's also difficult to get any kind of ethnic or ethnic-allegorical data out of creators unless they want to volunteer it.)
Ozzy Osbourne, front singer for Black Sabbath and otherwise well-known heavy mtal man (and reality TV star), fully assumes the title of Prince of Darkness at 76 years of age.
No longer dancing the masochism tango or poisoning pigeons in the park, or letting us know about which of the various periodic elements have made it to Harvard University, Tom Lehrer, satirist, musician, and otherwise funny person, died at 97 years of age. And after music, mostly went on to teach mathematics, so faded a touch from the spotlight, just the way he wanted. If you're not familiar with his work, he released all of his songs, the sheet music, and the lyrics, to the public domain, so that we can all do whatever we'd like with them.
Chuck Mangione is now playing trumpet again with Dizzy Gillespie, having achieved 84 years of age.
Malcolm Jamal-Warner, most famously known for starring alongside Bill Cosby in a sitcom of Cosby's, has accidentally drowned at 54 years of age. Since then, he had gone on to be a Grammy-winning musician and an actor in several other shows, more than just the role he carried on the show, which, given what's happened with Bill Cosby, is probably the thing he will be better remembered for.
Terry Bollea, also known by his wrestling moniker "Hollywood Hogan," a heel who was instrumental to the storyline founding World Championship Wrestling's New World Order, has tapped out at 71 years of age. Hollywood Hogan would stay well associated with the professional wrestling circuit after his debut, as well as the McMahons that own most of the promotions at this point, and expressed himself routinely as a supporter of the current administration and their policies. Another character attributed to him, the face "Hulk Hogan," continues to live on in the memories of wrestling fans and those who enjoy movies where wrestlers take up acting careers, unsullied by any of the actions or attitudes taken on by similarly-named "Hollywood Hogan." The Hulkamaniacs are probably pretty happy that there's nothing more than can be done to corrupt their memories based on the actions of Hollywood Hogan.
The International Court of Justice has sided with Vanuatu and says that all nations must work to limit climate change, or they can be pursued in the court for damages and claims from other nations affected by their disregard for the climate. Since it's the ICJ, the United States will mostly laugh at it and not pay the ruling any mind, but it does at least set the precedent where the countries and companies responsible for most of the climate change and pollution can be held to account for it and required to make reparations to the places they've damaged through that action / inaction to remedy.
An openly trans Spanish senator gave her candid opinions in word and gesture about the ways that the UK is trying to exclude trans people from the public sphere.
A suggestion on why showing up to mass protests, if you can do so, is one of the better ways to show that the authoritarians are not winning and there's no need to obey, in advance or otherwise, to their decrees that should be resisted. Because people showing up is treated with more weight, solidity, and reality, than most other ways of expressing your discontent with the way things are going. And enough people showing up gives more reality to the idea of "there are more of us than them, and we are the ones who can change the system."
And there's plenty to show up over, certainly. The United States government, for example, lied about the number of people on deportation flights to El Salvador, meaning there may be more people in the CECOT prison than had been previously thought, and those people have been without representation or anyone fighting to bring them back to the United States or get them proper trials.
The Food and Drug Administration has deployed a chatbot to approve drug regulations faster. As you might expect, the chatbot makes up nonexistent studies to justify approving things. Which then requires more time and effort from the FDA to untangle the confident bullshit than it probably would have to review the studies with humans. It's being billed as "optional," but I wouldn't be surprised if it stops being optional shortly because some people want volume of throughput instead of accuracy of analysis.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, known for supporting a lot of programming that got onto PBS stations, including Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and many other classics of public broadcasting, will be closing down, since the Republicans in the Congress has decided that they no longer wish to fund quality programming free on the airwaves. Because, of course, CPB-supported programs talked about and demonstrated the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which the current administration and Republicans everywhere are still trying to wave about as boogeymen that prevent the glory of the United States from shining, even though everyone knows they're doing it for racist, ableist, classist, misogynist, sexist, transmisic, and white supremacist reasons.
Instead of running on and throwing meat to the base about how there were so many damaging secrets in the files involving convicted pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the current administration has been trying to spike any and all interest in the story and the cover-up when it became abundantly clear that the current administrator had written him a lewd birthday missive surrounded by the drawing of a naked woman. To the point where the current administrator is suing everyone he can think of involved in the publication of the letter for billions of dollars in defamation damages. Having made ludicrous claims about the nature of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, it didn't take long for the photographic and video evidence to appear that the two men had a very close relationship, no matter what the current administrator claims about it. And even as the administration tries to do damage control and pull people away from the story, the administrator himself is furious that it's not working and he can't deflect attention away, because both his base and his opposition want the story to stay right there until they are satisfied. (He also keeps adding more details to it, like that Epstein used to poach young girls from his Mar-a-Lago club and that he's mad that Epstein kept taking his pretty girls away.)
Because military schools and bases are something this administration can control, they've demanded 596 books be completely banned from all base and military-controlled schools, all along common book banner lines. So books about puberty, sexuality, race and racism, and queer comics, and then some other books that likely have those topics in them, but aren't necessarily about them, making the book banning list appear pretty random. All of this is because of the usual executive orders demanding violations of First Amendment rights for students and others, but as we have seen plenty, this administration does not feel constrained by law or courts, and is routinely allowed to act outside of the law by the courts.
A significant amount of money has been poured into hiring more kidnappers, and because they want to do it quickly, they're not going to get the best candidates. (It's possible to argue that they specifically don't want the best candidates, because the best candidates will not do the kind of unchecked, unaccountable violence and racism that the administration specifically wants to have happen to immigrants or those simply suspected of being too brown to be citizens.)
Wrongfully-deported person Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been ordered released from federal custody by a jusge. The administration openly signaled they intended to re-arrest Mr., Abrego Garcia on different charges as soon as he arrives back in his home state, which I would think qualifies as showing animus and prejudice in the prosecution of the man, but if nobody is willing to explicitly say that the government is clearly targeting him because they had to admit they has erroneously targeted him, then I guess the farce continues.
A school superintendent in Vermont, and a U.S. citizen, was detained trying to return to the United States, separated from his husband, and subjected to the treatment that people who believe they will never be required to account for themselves give to those they consider to be their enemies and critics. With the agents asserting that at a point of entry, there are not constitutional rights, even for citizens, and refusing to give the man access to counsel during their "interrogation." Given that the citizen was returning from Nicaragua, there's a good chance that his detainment was because he looked too brown to be a white citizen, and therefore they could attack him with impunity.
A Department of Justice employee was fired from her position, and the Department cited that she was fired because because her husband has created and maintains an application allowing people with iProducts to track and report the presence of kidnappers in their locality. Her interest in the company her husband owns is in case her husband wins the lottery, and she disclosed it, but the Department thinks they can get much better traction out of painting the forensic accountant as some sort of radical allowing for the undocumented to escape kidnapping and supporting the tracking and threatening of the kidnappers.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the executive order demanding that citizenship not be issued to the children of undocumented persons is flagrantly against the reading of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The administration will take this to the Supreme Court of the United States, who, based on their current record, are likely to rule that the President may do whatever he wants, regardless of what the law says, with a strong dissent from the justices who actually understand the rule of law and the purpose of such. And because they intend to win on the matter, no matter what stands in their way, they have released their plans for determining who is entitled to citizenship at birth, and most of them would require someone to prove they have appropriate citizenship or permanent resident status at the time of the child's birth to get them citizenship. It also intends to revoke the resident statuses of several groups who are currently lawfully allowed to reside, and furthermore intends to ensure that those who are here "unlawfully" pass their deportable status down to their children from the moment of birth. And since the kidnappers have already shown that they will appear anywhere they want to so they can effect kidnappings, one can imagine what kind of care will be sought and given to those in labor if there's any doubt that they might be seen as unlawfully present. Since, of course, these kidnappers don't bother to check on someone's status or paperwork before kidnapping them, you can probably safely assume that anyone who doesn't look white enough will be questioned about their citizenship status, and quite possibly deported even if they have all of the appropriate and legal documents on them when they go to the hospital. So, if this is allowed to go into existence, not only will it flagrantly contradict the Constitution and long-settled judicial precedent, you can expect the mortality rate to rise severely for infants and those giving birth to infants in non-white demographics.
The administration is also making sure to take time out and engage in petty revenge as well as the rest of their malfeasance. The Special Counsel who ably investigated the January 6th insurrection and the roles that the current administrator and his cronies played in that insurrection is now being investigated for violations of the Hatch Act, with one Republican claiming that the Special Counsel's actions were "unprecedented interference" in the 2024 election. The Republican assumes it must have all been political because Smith was able to bring indictments but not actually prosecute them, which means he has a remarkably short memory for all the slowdown, delay, and other interference actions that happened from him and his colleagues to ensure that the cases could not be tried before the Presidential election. Since the person being indicted won the election, and thus the power to demand the trial disappear or pardon himself of any consequences of the trial, the prosecution became moot. Not because there was nothing there or because it was some kind of politically-motivated act. I expect the office investigating, however, will somehow manage to find some kind of violation, because that would please the administrator and allow him to rhetorically declare that the government itself found it was a witch-hunt, instead of relying only on his personal declarations.
After the agency she heads delivered a report on the number of jobs created last month, and a sharp revision downaward of previous months' numbers, that displeased the current administrator, the administrator fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and accused her of manipulating the data for political purposes. He also went on a social media tirade against the chair of the Federal Reserve, accusing him of also committing economic sabotage designed to make him and his administration look bad. Several of the commentators on this pointed out the large danger of actual data manipulation if providing accurate numbers just means that people get fired until they provide him with data that he likes and wants. Or the likelier situation where governmental data collection simply stops because data that goes against the would-be emperor's pronouncements is forbidden.and all of us must remember that we have always been at war with Eastasia until we are at war with Eurasia, and then we have always been at war with Eurasia. (And because he'll fire everyone and shutter any agency or department that dares to collect data that contradicts him and then publish it.)
A pilot of a commercial aircraft made hard maneuvers during a landing procedure so as to avoid a United States military aircraft that was in the same space as they were, and that they were unaware of until sighting it.
As a condition of Paramount's merger with Skydance, the Federal Communications Commission has appointed a minder for the Columbia Broadcast System to ensure that they don't say anything the administration dislikes. As with all other agencies and executive functions of this administration, the obvious quid pro quo is both a sign of corruption for the administration and a sign of cowardice on the part of Paramount, who have paid a bribe to the administration and accepted that they will become a pro-administration mouthpiece to get the companies merged. So when CBS sounds more like Fox News, you'll know why.
Paramount-Skydance's properties probably won't be allowed to make fun of the administrator by butting him in bed with Satan himself, either, since the thin-skinned administrator really hates being made fun of.
Maryland has suffered severe flooding damage, just like Texas, but because Maryland's governor is not buddy-buddy with this administration, they can't get federal disaster relief funds, following in a trend where the administration can't seem to find money or need for money to states controlled by people who still believe in democracy, but can seem to find aid and assistance to those who are on board with his antidemocratic agenda.
The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committees may have violated federal law, and certainly has sold out their ethics, by refusing to allow transgender athletes to compete on their correct teams. The law says that the USOC and USPC may not impose additional restrictions on participation in sport beyond what their international governing bodies do. The USOC and USPC, however, seem to have used as their excuse that "well, we're federally-constituted entities, therefore we have to obey the executive order requirements," refusing to admit to themselves that EOs are not laws, nor do they have the force of them. The USOC also appears to have decided that they're willing to subject their own athletes to the same kind of harassment as followed Imane Khalif when others questioned her gender. One can only wonder how many US athletes will be accused of being secret men if they do well in the upcoming Games, just to force them to go through an invasive process to satisfy weird people. (And we know that the scrutiny will be on the women athletes, of course, and specifically the ones who don't look pretty and white.)
More details from the shooting of a Minnesota lawmaker and his wife indicate the police knew the nature of the threat, but took their fucking sweet time about responding to it and letting others know about what was happening. There will be investigations, but this is probably going to be another piece of evidence indicating how much police are not great at their stated jobs, especially for the salaries they are paid.
From the archives, putting a pin in the balloon that there will be plenty of people who can take over the jobs of migrant farm workers and do that job equally as well and swiftly. We tried it, and the strong, muscular young men selected for the job burnt to a crisp on the job within two weeks, and then walked off of the jobs. So not only did we prove that the conditions those migrants labor in are inhumane, we also proved that those migrants could not be easily replaced. The kidnapping squadrons should be stopped on principle, but for those people who agree with the principles, there are practicalities involved that say the kidnappers should be stopped as well.
Queer as in Fuck You, which I'm pretty sure I've linked to before, but which is always relevant and salient in our times, not just because you can trace what's happened that was predicted, but because it reminds us that things like gender are the result of having lived an entire life. While we have words that describe various groupings, they are always and forever approximations, matters negotiated and in relation between people.
A young man whose preferred era of cosplay is the 1940s, although he's trying more than most to see what of the era he can incorporate and use in his daily life, in much the way that the Society for Creative Anachronism encourages the same in its persons of the Known World. To at least keep the good, or the interesting, and to reject the things that persons of this era recognize as historically authentic, but utterly unsuited to the understanding of the world in the times of this era. (Which is also why the players of the Known World are members of the aristocracy, as that is the only social class that would allow for the costuming, the time to practice the arts and sciences, and all the other elements that are part of the SCA.)
More seriously, Roma people are mostly absented from the official history of the United States and the Americas, making it difficult to find and reconstruct the accounts of their presence. Because, of course, just like all other groups, there are Roma in the United States as they immigrate into the area and remain. It's just that we don't get much history incorporated, and a lot of what is there is people reacting and being racist toward the Roma.
Those who argue that the nuclear family is and always has been the best kind of family unit that we should be moving back toward and changing laws to create more of are mistaken. The nuclear family, and the images of the 1950s and 1960s, are historical weird points.
A copyright infringement suit filed in the US against a TikTok creator that puts nominally wholesome and cute creatures into darker storylines in the videos. The brand that creates the cute creatures says the darker stories are harming the brand significantly, the creator of the videos claims they are parodies (and therefore would be protected speech in the venue of the suit, the United States, if the parody claim can be substantiated.) I know full well that humans are creative and will do their very best to make even the cutest of things into destructive harbingers of the apocalypse, when given the opportunity to do so, and especially in ways that are parodies of the originals. And choosing the U.S. as your venue for the suit probably makes it harder to prove the necessary case, because of the broad First Amendment protections that are present for things like parody and satire.
Algorithmic clout and knowing that social media platforms are tuned for engagement instead of cool things means that a relatively small amount of users / bots can create disproportionate impacts and make it seem like everyone is angry, polarized, and more than happy to share that opinion with everyone around them. Which is probably true, that there are network and magnifying effects at work here, and also I think there's a likelihood that people are more likely to be their actual selves when they're around people who are signaling that such behavior is welcome and encouraged in their spaces.
Tattoos imaged on persons preserved in ice from significant time ago indicates animals and mythical creatures.
A news organization getting to look around and see inside a reclusive, rural, white supremacist and whites-only community which has ambitions of turning the United States into a white supremacist, whites-only nation. Which says a lot more about the confidence that the community has that their positions and ideas will be accepted in the wider world than anything about the validity of those ideas. They must feel very confident that the momentum and the people are going their way, instead of getting a huge backlash from the world around them for being unapologetic white supremacist racists. (Especially because they believe their legal setup of being a private membership-based organization and limited liability corporation allows them to skirt federal and state laws about equal housing, equal opportunity, and other anti-discrimination measures that are still applicable to them.)
A fox in a library, removed safely and without harm to fox or materials.
The story of how a bird got into a movie where what's on screen doesn't look like the bird named, the call isn't anything like the bird named, the supposed exclusive habitat of the bird isn't that, either, and eventually, what kind of bird actually was used for the sound.
Converting image data to sound waveforms, teaching them to starlings, and finding that starlings can replicate those waveforms with sufficient fidelity to get a decent copy of the original image when the starling song is decoded.
In technology, The company that owns the rights and the technology of the Commodore 64 computer is releasing a faithful recreation and update, using FPGA technology for the mainboard, allowing the C64 to connect to all of the more modern technology that we have developed in the future, while also maintaining all of the original ports, drives, and connectors for anyone who has original peripherals that still work for them. (They're also releasing it with a clear case so you can peer inside, and with LEDs that react to the sound chip and games and other kinds of polish and retrowave improvements to the case.) The Commodore folks are also hoping to resurrect the Amiga workstations that were part of the Commodore brand and manufacture, if things go well, and that would also be a neat trick to perform, especially with as much community work that's gone into keeping Amigas alive and OS updated. (After all, Amigas are what brought us the CGI effects for Babylon 5, so we know they can do lots of things. (It only took them, what, 45 minutes to render one frame, so that's not too bad on a television production schedule, right?)
More than you wanted to know about constructing a Game Boy-compatible cartridge, including a significant amount of how the pins work, what pin writes and reads are needed to do memory bank switching and other complex controls, and how to generally make a compatible cart for the first generation Game Boy / Game Boy Pocket / Game Boy Color, either by harvesting some of the components of no longer fully working carts, or by substituting other controllers that can take on the necessary work and control schemes for using the pins available on the Game Boy.
A computer-generated person is modeling clothes in a Guess advertisement in Vogue magazine, and while there's a disclaimer, it's not very large. Which is not the first computer-generated person modeling clothing, not by a lot, but when Lightning was in Armani, we knew she was a computer-generated person. These ones seem to be meant toward trying to blur the distinction between actual people in actual clothes and computer-generated imagery.
Poor password security potentially exposed millions of records used by McDonalds' hiring chatbot software used with Paradox.ai. As the researchers detail, they were able to access a test account, then determine how the API for the system worked, then change variables in the API requests to obtain the personal data of anyone who has ever used the chatbot to try and apply for work at the company. The company says they've closed the method of access since it was disclosed to them, but there are plenty of other companies who should probably be looking at their own work with the company and seeing if they, too, have bad passwords or easy ways of having data accessed and exfiltrated.
An enterprising group of criminals attempted to gain access to a bank's most sensitive components of their ATM network by compromising a mail server, using a modem-enabled Raspberry Pi as the command-and-control computer, and disguising their malware processes with the names and command options of LightDM, a login screen manager very common in Linux machines. They failed, but they tried very hard not to get spotted by anyone and to have their logs look innocuous.
Two data breaches for the dating safety app Tea have exposed direct messages as well as the details of conversations, the names, phone numbers, and other personal details of the app users. The place that claimed it was the safest place to spill the tea was not nearly secure enough against intrusion, apparently. And now there's all of that data being strewn about the Internet, especially since 4channers claimed to have gotten into the databases.
If you have chosen to share your ChatGPT conversations with anyone, they've become indexable by Google, and so someone could search for your conversation and find it. Because, apparently, sharing with someone else and creating a more permanent URL means that the Googlebot gets to slurp it up, too.
There's new chatbot assistants in your library holdings searches, and if you ask them about certain legitimate research topics, they'll claim they can't find anything, even though the institution holds plenty of records on just that thing. According to the linked post, it's Microsoft's Azure OpenAI model imposing content filters and restrictions on the chatbot assistant, which only makes the Edvard Munch impression you should all be doing fractally more wrong. A researcher should not have to work around the sensibilities of a chatbot or a chatbot's corpoate filters to find what they are looking for. Even moreso, a researcher should not be asking a fucking chatbot for research assistance or to find anything in the research database! That's literally what the library and the library services are supposed to be for. No LLM can beat a half-trained library worker, and certainly not a subject specialist or other person employed by an academic institution for the express purpose of instruction and assistance to academic researchers and students.
From the people who started the series on trying to use Linux as a person who needs it to be accessible in all of its feature ways (and finding out all the many ways that Linux does not have a full accessibility suite that works all the time), a full-throated denunciation of someone who believed that having trouble with missing or not easily-working accessibility was a skill issue with computers, rather than a glaring oversight in the construction and use of Linux.
Yet more proof that no company is truly independent and that payment processors and banks are the ones who really control what we can see and do - this time, Valve is being pressured to remove content from Steam that a group has complained to their payment processors about. I don't know if that means they'll be cut off completely, or they'll be put into the highest risk category, because they have "adult" material on them, but it's definitely another one of those situations where a company is not allowed to exercise their own ideas and philosophies about what they want to platform because someone else has chosen to object to it. (This does not mean that anything like cryptocurrency is a real solution to the matter. What the solution involves is actual real risk assessment and not just deciding that anything that might have NSFW content has to be high risk or banned.) The same group then targeted itch.io, who responded by delisting all of their age-restricted content and deleting several of the projects on the website so that they could retain their arrangement with payment processors. (itch.io has begun re-indexing NSFW content, but only if it's free, so those who want to be paid for their NSFW content are still in the void.)
Reporting on the pressure group that turned Valve and itch.io's payment processors against them, Shout Collective, and their shady and untruthful practices, disappeared after the changes happened, and several Vice writers resigned in protest of the censorship of the reporting.
If you are inclined to engage in your own shouting at the payment processors and their decisions to give in to a pressure group and force others to do the same, there are plenty of ways to contact the payment processors and explain to them in very small words how foolish an idea it is for them to do this.
The campaign to call the payment processors and explain to them in very small words how foolish they are appears to be working well.
If some of your work is nsfw or otherwise possibly vulnerable to puritanical payment processing, there are some options you can engage with to make your position stronger if/when things come for you.
Good Old Games (GoG) made a selection of banned games available for free to claim for a short period of time.
A reviewer of products in Italy has been accused of copyright violation for reviewing machines that sometimes come pre-loaded with games on them. The manufacturers of the consoles may be committing the copyright violation by including the material in their consoles, but this seems like a very dangerous precedent to set in any country, to hold someone responsible for copyright violations for publishing reviews or purchasing devices that provide emulators to someone.
Proving that foolish ideas are often beaten by simple solutions, snapping a picture of a character in a video game and presenting that as your face analysis for new age verification requirements in the UK successfully verifies you as an adult. I suspect we're going to see all kinds of variations on this as easy ways of bypassing the age verification requirements for any and all systems, and that the people who maintain and build such systems will always be on the losing end of the arms race for this.
An LLM kept telling people that a piece of software had a feature it definitely did not. Rather than getting the LLM to correct itself, which it wouldn't do anyway, the developers just added the feature to bring reality into conformity with the bullshit machine.
The city of Helsinki has concluded a year without a traffic fatality, according to officials, who attributed the success to a myriad of factors, including lowered speed limits, designing the metropolitan area to make drivers nervous and therefore slower and more cautious, and increased priority and precedence given to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit. By reducing the number of cars in the area, Helsinki manages to reduce the number of fatalities, and for this year, that reduction is to zero. Congratulations. I'll bet there are a lot of people looking at the infrastructure there to see how they can design dense urban areas to do the same, and then possibly find ways of expanding those ideas out to suburban and rural areas that are usually much more car-prioritizing.
A jury in Miami is doing their part to discourage irresponsible car use by awarding a $240 million USD judgment against Tesla, finding the self-driving Autopilot mode in some Teslas significantly responsible for a deadly crash. The company attempted to put the blame on a distracted driver reaching for his cellphone, but the driver's testimony included that he believed the driving technology would kick in to prevent harm if it detected something that needed braking. The jury may also have been soured on Tesla's attempts to blame the driver when someone from one side proved that Tesla had the data that they needed to determine fault and responsibility and when the system was engaged and when it wasn't, but they weren't providing it to the people who were properly requesting it.
Last for tonight, five lego walker designs versus seven obstacles to navigate. It's interesting to see what designs do better against the various things put in their way.
The innate shallowness of decorating a space with books mostly by the look of the books, rather than because you are someone who has read many books and therefore your space is decorated with your own media selections.
And if you take a definition of humiliation as the forced recognition of domination and then apply it forward to both social and political situations and suddenly you have a really accurate blueprint for why certain things persist, even though it's clear that they are inefficient, they don't provide a lot of joy to the people who humiliate others, and they have lasting and terrible consequences for the people who are humiliated. And it also helps us think about how to build a society where humiliation is harder, less possible, and more strongly pushed back against by those who are more likely to be attacked.
(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.)
Also, A claimed nearly-100% effective drug against HIV infection, lenacapavir, is going to market, with deals for generics and no-profit manufacture in several countries around the world, instead of only as an expensive brand name. Twice-yearly injections appears to be the schedule for pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), and this could be a breakthrough that can finally put down the HIV/AIDS epidemic. What a day that will be, if we can get that virus to die off.
The 2025 version of the Gender Census is running, so if you are a person for whom the label of "man" or "woman" doesn't always apply at all times and in all cases, you are encouraged to take the survey.
The Archive of Our Own Ship Top 100 for 2025 is out, with secondary units involving top 100 F/F ships and the All Time Top 100 with this year's data added to it. Of note is an F/F ship breaking the top 5 for this year. (Also of note is a few comments complaining about how "Latino" is an ethnicity, not a race, and that it's overbroad, which are accurate things. It's also difficult to get any kind of ethnic or ethnic-allegorical data out of creators unless they want to volunteer it.)
Ozzy Osbourne, front singer for Black Sabbath and otherwise well-known heavy mtal man (and reality TV star), fully assumes the title of Prince of Darkness at 76 years of age.
No longer dancing the masochism tango or poisoning pigeons in the park, or letting us know about which of the various periodic elements have made it to Harvard University, Tom Lehrer, satirist, musician, and otherwise funny person, died at 97 years of age. And after music, mostly went on to teach mathematics, so faded a touch from the spotlight, just the way he wanted. If you're not familiar with his work, he released all of his songs, the sheet music, and the lyrics, to the public domain, so that we can all do whatever we'd like with them.
Chuck Mangione is now playing trumpet again with Dizzy Gillespie, having achieved 84 years of age.
Malcolm Jamal-Warner, most famously known for starring alongside Bill Cosby in a sitcom of Cosby's, has accidentally drowned at 54 years of age. Since then, he had gone on to be a Grammy-winning musician and an actor in several other shows, more than just the role he carried on the show, which, given what's happened with Bill Cosby, is probably the thing he will be better remembered for.
Terry Bollea, also known by his wrestling moniker "Hollywood Hogan," a heel who was instrumental to the storyline founding World Championship Wrestling's New World Order, has tapped out at 71 years of age. Hollywood Hogan would stay well associated with the professional wrestling circuit after his debut, as well as the McMahons that own most of the promotions at this point, and expressed himself routinely as a supporter of the current administration and their policies. Another character attributed to him, the face "Hulk Hogan," continues to live on in the memories of wrestling fans and those who enjoy movies where wrestlers take up acting careers, unsullied by any of the actions or attitudes taken on by similarly-named "Hollywood Hogan." The Hulkamaniacs are probably pretty happy that there's nothing more than can be done to corrupt their memories based on the actions of Hollywood Hogan.
The International Court of Justice has sided with Vanuatu and says that all nations must work to limit climate change, or they can be pursued in the court for damages and claims from other nations affected by their disregard for the climate. Since it's the ICJ, the United States will mostly laugh at it and not pay the ruling any mind, but it does at least set the precedent where the countries and companies responsible for most of the climate change and pollution can be held to account for it and required to make reparations to the places they've damaged through that action / inaction to remedy.
An openly trans Spanish senator gave her candid opinions in word and gesture about the ways that the UK is trying to exclude trans people from the public sphere.
A suggestion on why showing up to mass protests, if you can do so, is one of the better ways to show that the authoritarians are not winning and there's no need to obey, in advance or otherwise, to their decrees that should be resisted. Because people showing up is treated with more weight, solidity, and reality, than most other ways of expressing your discontent with the way things are going. And enough people showing up gives more reality to the idea of "there are more of us than them, and we are the ones who can change the system."
And there's plenty to show up over, certainly. The United States government, for example, lied about the number of people on deportation flights to El Salvador, meaning there may be more people in the CECOT prison than had been previously thought, and those people have been without representation or anyone fighting to bring them back to the United States or get them proper trials.
The Food and Drug Administration has deployed a chatbot to approve drug regulations faster. As you might expect, the chatbot makes up nonexistent studies to justify approving things. Which then requires more time and effort from the FDA to untangle the confident bullshit than it probably would have to review the studies with humans. It's being billed as "optional," but I wouldn't be surprised if it stops being optional shortly because some people want volume of throughput instead of accuracy of analysis.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, known for supporting a lot of programming that got onto PBS stations, including Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, and many other classics of public broadcasting, will be closing down, since the Republicans in the Congress has decided that they no longer wish to fund quality programming free on the airwaves. Because, of course, CPB-supported programs talked about and demonstrated the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which the current administration and Republicans everywhere are still trying to wave about as boogeymen that prevent the glory of the United States from shining, even though everyone knows they're doing it for racist, ableist, classist, misogynist, sexist, transmisic, and white supremacist reasons.
Instead of running on and throwing meat to the base about how there were so many damaging secrets in the files involving convicted pederast and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the current administration has been trying to spike any and all interest in the story and the cover-up when it became abundantly clear that the current administrator had written him a lewd birthday missive surrounded by the drawing of a naked woman. To the point where the current administrator is suing everyone he can think of involved in the publication of the letter for billions of dollars in defamation damages. Having made ludicrous claims about the nature of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, it didn't take long for the photographic and video evidence to appear that the two men had a very close relationship, no matter what the current administrator claims about it. And even as the administration tries to do damage control and pull people away from the story, the administrator himself is furious that it's not working and he can't deflect attention away, because both his base and his opposition want the story to stay right there until they are satisfied. (He also keeps adding more details to it, like that Epstein used to poach young girls from his Mar-a-Lago club and that he's mad that Epstein kept taking his pretty girls away.)
Because military schools and bases are something this administration can control, they've demanded 596 books be completely banned from all base and military-controlled schools, all along common book banner lines. So books about puberty, sexuality, race and racism, and queer comics, and then some other books that likely have those topics in them, but aren't necessarily about them, making the book banning list appear pretty random. All of this is because of the usual executive orders demanding violations of First Amendment rights for students and others, but as we have seen plenty, this administration does not feel constrained by law or courts, and is routinely allowed to act outside of the law by the courts.
A significant amount of money has been poured into hiring more kidnappers, and because they want to do it quickly, they're not going to get the best candidates. (It's possible to argue that they specifically don't want the best candidates, because the best candidates will not do the kind of unchecked, unaccountable violence and racism that the administration specifically wants to have happen to immigrants or those simply suspected of being too brown to be citizens.)
Wrongfully-deported person Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been ordered released from federal custody by a jusge. The administration openly signaled they intended to re-arrest Mr., Abrego Garcia on different charges as soon as he arrives back in his home state, which I would think qualifies as showing animus and prejudice in the prosecution of the man, but if nobody is willing to explicitly say that the government is clearly targeting him because they had to admit they has erroneously targeted him, then I guess the farce continues.
A school superintendent in Vermont, and a U.S. citizen, was detained trying to return to the United States, separated from his husband, and subjected to the treatment that people who believe they will never be required to account for themselves give to those they consider to be their enemies and critics. With the agents asserting that at a point of entry, there are not constitutional rights, even for citizens, and refusing to give the man access to counsel during their "interrogation." Given that the citizen was returning from Nicaragua, there's a good chance that his detainment was because he looked too brown to be a white citizen, and therefore they could attack him with impunity.
A Department of Justice employee was fired from her position, and the Department cited that she was fired because because her husband has created and maintains an application allowing people with iProducts to track and report the presence of kidnappers in their locality. Her interest in the company her husband owns is in case her husband wins the lottery, and she disclosed it, but the Department thinks they can get much better traction out of painting the forensic accountant as some sort of radical allowing for the undocumented to escape kidnapping and supporting the tracking and threatening of the kidnappers.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the executive order demanding that citizenship not be issued to the children of undocumented persons is flagrantly against the reading of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The administration will take this to the Supreme Court of the United States, who, based on their current record, are likely to rule that the President may do whatever he wants, regardless of what the law says, with a strong dissent from the justices who actually understand the rule of law and the purpose of such. And because they intend to win on the matter, no matter what stands in their way, they have released their plans for determining who is entitled to citizenship at birth, and most of them would require someone to prove they have appropriate citizenship or permanent resident status at the time of the child's birth to get them citizenship. It also intends to revoke the resident statuses of several groups who are currently lawfully allowed to reside, and furthermore intends to ensure that those who are here "unlawfully" pass their deportable status down to their children from the moment of birth. And since the kidnappers have already shown that they will appear anywhere they want to so they can effect kidnappings, one can imagine what kind of care will be sought and given to those in labor if there's any doubt that they might be seen as unlawfully present. Since, of course, these kidnappers don't bother to check on someone's status or paperwork before kidnapping them, you can probably safely assume that anyone who doesn't look white enough will be questioned about their citizenship status, and quite possibly deported even if they have all of the appropriate and legal documents on them when they go to the hospital. So, if this is allowed to go into existence, not only will it flagrantly contradict the Constitution and long-settled judicial precedent, you can expect the mortality rate to rise severely for infants and those giving birth to infants in non-white demographics.
The administration is also making sure to take time out and engage in petty revenge as well as the rest of their malfeasance. The Special Counsel who ably investigated the January 6th insurrection and the roles that the current administrator and his cronies played in that insurrection is now being investigated for violations of the Hatch Act, with one Republican claiming that the Special Counsel's actions were "unprecedented interference" in the 2024 election. The Republican assumes it must have all been political because Smith was able to bring indictments but not actually prosecute them, which means he has a remarkably short memory for all the slowdown, delay, and other interference actions that happened from him and his colleagues to ensure that the cases could not be tried before the Presidential election. Since the person being indicted won the election, and thus the power to demand the trial disappear or pardon himself of any consequences of the trial, the prosecution became moot. Not because there was nothing there or because it was some kind of politically-motivated act. I expect the office investigating, however, will somehow manage to find some kind of violation, because that would please the administrator and allow him to rhetorically declare that the government itself found it was a witch-hunt, instead of relying only on his personal declarations.
After the agency she heads delivered a report on the number of jobs created last month, and a sharp revision downaward of previous months' numbers, that displeased the current administrator, the administrator fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and accused her of manipulating the data for political purposes. He also went on a social media tirade against the chair of the Federal Reserve, accusing him of also committing economic sabotage designed to make him and his administration look bad. Several of the commentators on this pointed out the large danger of actual data manipulation if providing accurate numbers just means that people get fired until they provide him with data that he likes and wants. Or the likelier situation where governmental data collection simply stops because data that goes against the would-be emperor's pronouncements is forbidden.and all of us must remember that we have always been at war with Eastasia until we are at war with Eurasia, and then we have always been at war with Eurasia. (And because he'll fire everyone and shutter any agency or department that dares to collect data that contradicts him and then publish it.)
A pilot of a commercial aircraft made hard maneuvers during a landing procedure so as to avoid a United States military aircraft that was in the same space as they were, and that they were unaware of until sighting it.
As a condition of Paramount's merger with Skydance, the Federal Communications Commission has appointed a minder for the Columbia Broadcast System to ensure that they don't say anything the administration dislikes. As with all other agencies and executive functions of this administration, the obvious quid pro quo is both a sign of corruption for the administration and a sign of cowardice on the part of Paramount, who have paid a bribe to the administration and accepted that they will become a pro-administration mouthpiece to get the companies merged. So when CBS sounds more like Fox News, you'll know why.
Paramount-Skydance's properties probably won't be allowed to make fun of the administrator by butting him in bed with Satan himself, either, since the thin-skinned administrator really hates being made fun of.
Maryland has suffered severe flooding damage, just like Texas, but because Maryland's governor is not buddy-buddy with this administration, they can't get federal disaster relief funds, following in a trend where the administration can't seem to find money or need for money to states controlled by people who still believe in democracy, but can seem to find aid and assistance to those who are on board with his antidemocratic agenda.
The United States Olympic and Paralympic Committees may have violated federal law, and certainly has sold out their ethics, by refusing to allow transgender athletes to compete on their correct teams. The law says that the USOC and USPC may not impose additional restrictions on participation in sport beyond what their international governing bodies do. The USOC and USPC, however, seem to have used as their excuse that "well, we're federally-constituted entities, therefore we have to obey the executive order requirements," refusing to admit to themselves that EOs are not laws, nor do they have the force of them. The USOC also appears to have decided that they're willing to subject their own athletes to the same kind of harassment as followed Imane Khalif when others questioned her gender. One can only wonder how many US athletes will be accused of being secret men if they do well in the upcoming Games, just to force them to go through an invasive process to satisfy weird people. (And we know that the scrutiny will be on the women athletes, of course, and specifically the ones who don't look pretty and white.)
More details from the shooting of a Minnesota lawmaker and his wife indicate the police knew the nature of the threat, but took their fucking sweet time about responding to it and letting others know about what was happening. There will be investigations, but this is probably going to be another piece of evidence indicating how much police are not great at their stated jobs, especially for the salaries they are paid.
From the archives, putting a pin in the balloon that there will be plenty of people who can take over the jobs of migrant farm workers and do that job equally as well and swiftly. We tried it, and the strong, muscular young men selected for the job burnt to a crisp on the job within two weeks, and then walked off of the jobs. So not only did we prove that the conditions those migrants labor in are inhumane, we also proved that those migrants could not be easily replaced. The kidnapping squadrons should be stopped on principle, but for those people who agree with the principles, there are practicalities involved that say the kidnappers should be stopped as well.
Queer as in Fuck You, which I'm pretty sure I've linked to before, but which is always relevant and salient in our times, not just because you can trace what's happened that was predicted, but because it reminds us that things like gender are the result of having lived an entire life. While we have words that describe various groupings, they are always and forever approximations, matters negotiated and in relation between people.
A young man whose preferred era of cosplay is the 1940s, although he's trying more than most to see what of the era he can incorporate and use in his daily life, in much the way that the Society for Creative Anachronism encourages the same in its persons of the Known World. To at least keep the good, or the interesting, and to reject the things that persons of this era recognize as historically authentic, but utterly unsuited to the understanding of the world in the times of this era. (Which is also why the players of the Known World are members of the aristocracy, as that is the only social class that would allow for the costuming, the time to practice the arts and sciences, and all the other elements that are part of the SCA.)
More seriously, Roma people are mostly absented from the official history of the United States and the Americas, making it difficult to find and reconstruct the accounts of their presence. Because, of course, just like all other groups, there are Roma in the United States as they immigrate into the area and remain. It's just that we don't get much history incorporated, and a lot of what is there is people reacting and being racist toward the Roma.
Those who argue that the nuclear family is and always has been the best kind of family unit that we should be moving back toward and changing laws to create more of are mistaken. The nuclear family, and the images of the 1950s and 1960s, are historical weird points.
A copyright infringement suit filed in the US against a TikTok creator that puts nominally wholesome and cute creatures into darker storylines in the videos. The brand that creates the cute creatures says the darker stories are harming the brand significantly, the creator of the videos claims they are parodies (and therefore would be protected speech in the venue of the suit, the United States, if the parody claim can be substantiated.) I know full well that humans are creative and will do their very best to make even the cutest of things into destructive harbingers of the apocalypse, when given the opportunity to do so, and especially in ways that are parodies of the originals. And choosing the U.S. as your venue for the suit probably makes it harder to prove the necessary case, because of the broad First Amendment protections that are present for things like parody and satire.
Algorithmic clout and knowing that social media platforms are tuned for engagement instead of cool things means that a relatively small amount of users / bots can create disproportionate impacts and make it seem like everyone is angry, polarized, and more than happy to share that opinion with everyone around them. Which is probably true, that there are network and magnifying effects at work here, and also I think there's a likelihood that people are more likely to be their actual selves when they're around people who are signaling that such behavior is welcome and encouraged in their spaces.
Tattoos imaged on persons preserved in ice from significant time ago indicates animals and mythical creatures.
A news organization getting to look around and see inside a reclusive, rural, white supremacist and whites-only community which has ambitions of turning the United States into a white supremacist, whites-only nation. Which says a lot more about the confidence that the community has that their positions and ideas will be accepted in the wider world than anything about the validity of those ideas. They must feel very confident that the momentum and the people are going their way, instead of getting a huge backlash from the world around them for being unapologetic white supremacist racists. (Especially because they believe their legal setup of being a private membership-based organization and limited liability corporation allows them to skirt federal and state laws about equal housing, equal opportunity, and other anti-discrimination measures that are still applicable to them.)
A fox in a library, removed safely and without harm to fox or materials.
The story of how a bird got into a movie where what's on screen doesn't look like the bird named, the call isn't anything like the bird named, the supposed exclusive habitat of the bird isn't that, either, and eventually, what kind of bird actually was used for the sound.
Converting image data to sound waveforms, teaching them to starlings, and finding that starlings can replicate those waveforms with sufficient fidelity to get a decent copy of the original image when the starling song is decoded.
In technology, The company that owns the rights and the technology of the Commodore 64 computer is releasing a faithful recreation and update, using FPGA technology for the mainboard, allowing the C64 to connect to all of the more modern technology that we have developed in the future, while also maintaining all of the original ports, drives, and connectors for anyone who has original peripherals that still work for them. (They're also releasing it with a clear case so you can peer inside, and with LEDs that react to the sound chip and games and other kinds of polish and retrowave improvements to the case.) The Commodore folks are also hoping to resurrect the Amiga workstations that were part of the Commodore brand and manufacture, if things go well, and that would also be a neat trick to perform, especially with as much community work that's gone into keeping Amigas alive and OS updated. (After all, Amigas are what brought us the CGI effects for Babylon 5, so we know they can do lots of things. (It only took them, what, 45 minutes to render one frame, so that's not too bad on a television production schedule, right?)
More than you wanted to know about constructing a Game Boy-compatible cartridge, including a significant amount of how the pins work, what pin writes and reads are needed to do memory bank switching and other complex controls, and how to generally make a compatible cart for the first generation Game Boy / Game Boy Pocket / Game Boy Color, either by harvesting some of the components of no longer fully working carts, or by substituting other controllers that can take on the necessary work and control schemes for using the pins available on the Game Boy.
A computer-generated person is modeling clothes in a Guess advertisement in Vogue magazine, and while there's a disclaimer, it's not very large. Which is not the first computer-generated person modeling clothing, not by a lot, but when Lightning was in Armani, we knew she was a computer-generated person. These ones seem to be meant toward trying to blur the distinction between actual people in actual clothes and computer-generated imagery.
Poor password security potentially exposed millions of records used by McDonalds' hiring chatbot software used with Paradox.ai. As the researchers detail, they were able to access a test account, then determine how the API for the system worked, then change variables in the API requests to obtain the personal data of anyone who has ever used the chatbot to try and apply for work at the company. The company says they've closed the method of access since it was disclosed to them, but there are plenty of other companies who should probably be looking at their own work with the company and seeing if they, too, have bad passwords or easy ways of having data accessed and exfiltrated.
An enterprising group of criminals attempted to gain access to a bank's most sensitive components of their ATM network by compromising a mail server, using a modem-enabled Raspberry Pi as the command-and-control computer, and disguising their malware processes with the names and command options of LightDM, a login screen manager very common in Linux machines. They failed, but they tried very hard not to get spotted by anyone and to have their logs look innocuous.
Two data breaches for the dating safety app Tea have exposed direct messages as well as the details of conversations, the names, phone numbers, and other personal details of the app users. The place that claimed it was the safest place to spill the tea was not nearly secure enough against intrusion, apparently. And now there's all of that data being strewn about the Internet, especially since 4channers claimed to have gotten into the databases.
If you have chosen to share your ChatGPT conversations with anyone, they've become indexable by Google, and so someone could search for your conversation and find it. Because, apparently, sharing with someone else and creating a more permanent URL means that the Googlebot gets to slurp it up, too.
There's new chatbot assistants in your library holdings searches, and if you ask them about certain legitimate research topics, they'll claim they can't find anything, even though the institution holds plenty of records on just that thing. According to the linked post, it's Microsoft's Azure OpenAI model imposing content filters and restrictions on the chatbot assistant, which only makes the Edvard Munch impression you should all be doing fractally more wrong. A researcher should not have to work around the sensibilities of a chatbot or a chatbot's corpoate filters to find what they are looking for. Even moreso, a researcher should not be asking a fucking chatbot for research assistance or to find anything in the research database! That's literally what the library and the library services are supposed to be for. No LLM can beat a half-trained library worker, and certainly not a subject specialist or other person employed by an academic institution for the express purpose of instruction and assistance to academic researchers and students.
From the people who started the series on trying to use Linux as a person who needs it to be accessible in all of its feature ways (and finding out all the many ways that Linux does not have a full accessibility suite that works all the time), a full-throated denunciation of someone who believed that having trouble with missing or not easily-working accessibility was a skill issue with computers, rather than a glaring oversight in the construction and use of Linux.
Yet more proof that no company is truly independent and that payment processors and banks are the ones who really control what we can see and do - this time, Valve is being pressured to remove content from Steam that a group has complained to their payment processors about. I don't know if that means they'll be cut off completely, or they'll be put into the highest risk category, because they have "adult" material on them, but it's definitely another one of those situations where a company is not allowed to exercise their own ideas and philosophies about what they want to platform because someone else has chosen to object to it. (This does not mean that anything like cryptocurrency is a real solution to the matter. What the solution involves is actual real risk assessment and not just deciding that anything that might have NSFW content has to be high risk or banned.) The same group then targeted itch.io, who responded by delisting all of their age-restricted content and deleting several of the projects on the website so that they could retain their arrangement with payment processors. (itch.io has begun re-indexing NSFW content, but only if it's free, so those who want to be paid for their NSFW content are still in the void.)
Reporting on the pressure group that turned Valve and itch.io's payment processors against them, Shout Collective, and their shady and untruthful practices, disappeared after the changes happened, and several Vice writers resigned in protest of the censorship of the reporting.
If you are inclined to engage in your own shouting at the payment processors and their decisions to give in to a pressure group and force others to do the same, there are plenty of ways to contact the payment processors and explain to them in very small words how foolish an idea it is for them to do this.
The campaign to call the payment processors and explain to them in very small words how foolish they are appears to be working well.
If some of your work is nsfw or otherwise possibly vulnerable to puritanical payment processing, there are some options you can engage with to make your position stronger if/when things come for you.
Good Old Games (GoG) made a selection of banned games available for free to claim for a short period of time.
A reviewer of products in Italy has been accused of copyright violation for reviewing machines that sometimes come pre-loaded with games on them. The manufacturers of the consoles may be committing the copyright violation by including the material in their consoles, but this seems like a very dangerous precedent to set in any country, to hold someone responsible for copyright violations for publishing reviews or purchasing devices that provide emulators to someone.
Proving that foolish ideas are often beaten by simple solutions, snapping a picture of a character in a video game and presenting that as your face analysis for new age verification requirements in the UK successfully verifies you as an adult. I suspect we're going to see all kinds of variations on this as easy ways of bypassing the age verification requirements for any and all systems, and that the people who maintain and build such systems will always be on the losing end of the arms race for this.
An LLM kept telling people that a piece of software had a feature it definitely did not. Rather than getting the LLM to correct itself, which it wouldn't do anyway, the developers just added the feature to bring reality into conformity with the bullshit machine.
The city of Helsinki has concluded a year without a traffic fatality, according to officials, who attributed the success to a myriad of factors, including lowered speed limits, designing the metropolitan area to make drivers nervous and therefore slower and more cautious, and increased priority and precedence given to pedestrians, cyclists, and public transit. By reducing the number of cars in the area, Helsinki manages to reduce the number of fatalities, and for this year, that reduction is to zero. Congratulations. I'll bet there are a lot of people looking at the infrastructure there to see how they can design dense urban areas to do the same, and then possibly find ways of expanding those ideas out to suburban and rural areas that are usually much more car-prioritizing.
A jury in Miami is doing their part to discourage irresponsible car use by awarding a $240 million USD judgment against Tesla, finding the self-driving Autopilot mode in some Teslas significantly responsible for a deadly crash. The company attempted to put the blame on a distracted driver reaching for his cellphone, but the driver's testimony included that he believed the driving technology would kick in to prevent harm if it detected something that needed braking. The jury may also have been soured on Tesla's attempts to blame the driver when someone from one side proved that Tesla had the data that they needed to determine fault and responsibility and when the system was engaged and when it wasn't, but they weren't providing it to the people who were properly requesting it.
Last for tonight, five lego walker designs versus seven obstacles to navigate. It's interesting to see what designs do better against the various things put in their way.
The innate shallowness of decorating a space with books mostly by the look of the books, rather than because you are someone who has read many books and therefore your space is decorated with your own media selections.
And if you take a definition of humiliation as the forced recognition of domination and then apply it forward to both social and political situations and suddenly you have a really accurate blueprint for why certain things persist, even though it's clear that they are inefficient, they don't provide a lot of joy to the people who humiliate others, and they have lasting and terrible consequences for the people who are humiliated. And it also helps us think about how to build a society where humiliation is harder, less possible, and more strongly pushed back against by those who are more likely to be attacked.
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-04 04:48 pm (UTC)