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silveradeptLet's begin with an academic paper exploring the way that online puppygirl culture embodies a rejection of those things used as markers of human success because of the way that the highly transfeminine nature of puppygirls are usually denied the full markers of humanity based on their transness. The author notes at the end the limitations around embracing inhumanity for persons who have been and continue to be treated as inhuman based on their skin colors and perceived origins, and that the relative homogeneity of participants in online puppygirl culture and media often gives them blinkers in places they could stand to be more inclusive. I enjoyed reading it, perhaps you will, too.
The still-apparently-novel concept that people who have systems tuned toward novelty and curiosity might be beneficial to current society (instead of only the hunter-gatherers) and that environments made for others are not helpful to them.
The Archive of Our Own reminds us that they are dealing with an influx of spam accounts that leave generic praise comments and then offer to discuss off-site things like making fanart for your story. Part of it is that such commercial solicitation is barred on the Archive, but the easiest way to spot it, other than the invitation offsite, is that the comment itself doesn't have anything specific about the story. It's usually posted to the most recent story that's available. And some of these spammers are creating AO3 accounts to spam with, so disabling guest comments won't necessarily protect you from receiving them.
Nostalgia for times where scarcity required planning and people got a certain thrill out of the act of chasing things and not knowing whether their selections would turn out to be good ones. I am more inclined not to be nostalgic for that, but to be annoyed at the way that the expertise of the record clerk, the librarian, and the bookstore buyer are being devalued in favor of machines that their promoters claim have intelligence and can do all of those things a human can do, and better.
Robert Redford, actor, director, and well-known environmental activist, has left the world at 89 years of age. He is also responsible for the body that produces the annual Sundance Film Festival.
Anonymous art creators have unveiled a statue of the current administrator and known child trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein holding hands, celebrating their friendship, and using the text of the administrator's birthday note to Epstein as commentary. You know, that text that strongly suggests that the two of them share an interest in pederasty and molestation of women and young girls, buttressed by some of the public statements the administrator has made about his interest in such. (As well as having been found liable for sexual assault earlier on in his life.)
After having complained mightily about a stopped escalator and wonky teleprompter during his visit to the United Nations, the administrator was required to look for another excuse to blame the UN for when it was clear his own team were responsible for his mishaps.
There was an opportunity for reality to intrude upon the administrator, as he seemed to realize that what he was being fed in his media streams was not what was actually happening in Portland, Oregon. This realization will last about as long as it takes for his media streams to swallow him back up again and his sycophants to return to requesting the deployment of excessive force to left-leaning cities and states in a campaign of intimidation and terror against those who don't want to fall in line with him.
The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel's late-night television program was very short-lived, with reinstatement happening just after the weekend where Kimmel was suspended based on manufactured outrage at his comments on the Charlie Kirk murder, and significant interference and threats from the FCC head that if Disney didn't suspend Kimmel, he would retaliate against the company and their licensees. The threat had some teeth because Sinclair Broadcasting (the ones who forced their local anchors to read national scripts about conservative subjects Sinclair wanted washed through them) and Nexstar, another conglomeration with a merger before the FCC to become even bigger and have more control over the broadcast television in the country, said they would not carry Kimmel's show even if he were allowed to continue making it. Under pressure from the people who watch Sinclair and Nexstar stations and don't want those companies censoring and controlling what they watch, Sinclair and Nexstar relented and will carry Kimmel again. They claimed that their decision to remove the programming had nothing to do with government influence and interaction, and they could very well be correct about that, as Sinclair and Nexstar are already friendly to this administration, so they wouldn't need an FCC threat against them to do what the administration wants.
While Kimmel is high-profile and produced most of the outrage, accurate commentary on Kirk has resulted in many other persons being removed from their jobs and they have not received nearly as much fury and indignation at their firings. So now that Kimmel's back on the air, that rage should turn to ensuring that others who were dismissed because of their accurate comments also get back on the air.
The comments that remain accurate about Kirk and his legacy are certainly not disproven when at his memorial service, an administration aide embraced the idea that his side is all about white supremacy, and laying claim to being the true inheritors of Greece and Rome, and that they intend to make Charlie Kirk into a martyr for their cause, and to use his death as the excuse for furthering and intensifying the hatred and destruction they were already planning on doing. That hagiography will rely on removing things that will always be true about what Kirk said and in inserting things that are untrue about the person (or shadowy cabal) that killed Kirk. There is no evidence, for example, that the alleged killer was part of any militant left-wing organizations, even though the administration is trying to erase the facts that right-wing alignment tends to result in more extremist attacks and domestic terror than left-wing alignment. More and more, it looks like the alleged killer did what he's alleged to have done because of the things that Charlie Kirk said and did, and the threats he saw from that to people that he loved.
The assassination and subsequent manhunt also revealed just how much law enforcement is already in your social media, without having to necessarily ask for a warrant to surveil you. Of course, this also reminds me that some people elsewhere have composed jaunty rhymes to help someone identify which person in their social circle is likely to be the government plant or informant.
And, in case you were curious, there were two more instances of mass violence, both of them with decent indicators that the perpetrators were deeply into funhouse versions of reality popular in right-wing circles. But these are, of course, not part of any systemic indication. Only left-wing violence is allowed to be systemic in this administration.
The recently dismissed head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified to a Congressional hearing that her dismissal was predicated on her unwillingness to provide blanket approval, in advance, for the upcoming recommendations of a vaccination council that has had all the medical professionals dismissed and replaced with vaccine skeptics. The Health and Human Services Secretary testified earlier that he had asked her, point-blank, if she was trustworthy, and she had said she wasn't, which strains credulity to believe that has happened. The Director's testimony said that the Health and Human Services Secretary told her that he didn't trust her, and she suggested that if he didn't trust her, he could fire her. The Director paints the HHS secretary as looking for rubber stamps for his and the President's agenda, instead of following and recommending what medical professionals and scientists recommend. I'm more inclined to believe the Director, but that's mostly because I have heard many of the public statements of the HHS Secretary, and he seems exactly the kind of person that his detractors and opponents said he was.
Emboldened by the anti-vaccination stances of the HHS Secretary, and several other public health officials who seem to think they are stewards of the freedom to die from preventable, easily communicable diseases rather than custodians of a robust public health, more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children, and as a consequence, childhood vaccination rates are plummeting across the United States, some below the minimum percentages needed to achieve "herd immunity". (There's also some amount of "lower-income folks and those who can't easily get their children to a place providing vaccines have trouble keeping up with the vaccinations," which could be solved with any number of social insurance programs, or funding vaccination clinics at the schools, or making it mandatory that employers give paid time off for workers to ensure their children are immunized and able to see medics, or any number of things that the "freedom" party generally detests as an imposition on the rights of a boss to do with their workers whatever they want.)
The current administrator proclaimed something with a mountain of evidence and scientific study that says what was spoken was bullshit. Which is not just about spouting bullshit, but spouting eugenicist bullshit that is intended to frame disability as worse than death, and that the disabled are deserving of death to "free" them from their disability, as well as a framing that says someone should harm themselves during pregnancy rather than take an effective pain reliever and fever reducer that doesn't have the potential of bad effects on the developing fetus.
If you are still in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (and if you're reading this contemporaneously, you likely are), the use of H1 and H2 antihistamines continues appearing useful as part of a multi-faceted defense against infection of the virus. Mostly by keeping the preferred way of the virus getting attached to your cells busy doing something else instead. It does work better when combined with other methods of preventing infection and transmission, and, of course, we cannot emphasize enough, take all the rest that your body is telling you to do. (Even though we know that for many of you, you don't actually have enough sick time in your bank, assuming you have a sick time bank, to take all the necessary rest days toward recovery, because your employer wishes to extract profit from you in the same way that your landlord does.)
Psychiatric hospitals have requirements to provide services to those in emergency and urgent care needs, but some are discharging those patients before they are stabilized, and the federal government is not doing its diligence in making sure that those hospitals that violate the law are appropriately disciplined and brought back into compliance. Unsurprisingly, that particular arm has been targeted for significant budget cuts and had their personnel reduced by the Elon team and others who believe that accountability services should only be seen as budget savings. And the hospitals that are discharging the patients are often doing so because their insurance companies won't pay for care, and the profit-seekers running the hospitals don't want to have to pony up for uncompensated care. The law is clear on these matters, but the records are likely to be fudged or forged or otherwise brought into harmony with what the insurance company will do, rather than what the patient actually needs. (So, y'know, another argument for taxpayer-funded medicine is that there's no longer a need to worry about how insurance company profits or hospital profits will prevent someone from receiving proper care.)
A Congressional report released continues to support whistleblower claims that the Elon Musk team has access to the entirety of the Social Security numbers, and is currently storing those numbers on a cloud server that is insufficiently protected and hardened against criminal hacks. The database also has other information that would make it trivially easy to engage in identity theft with the database and corresponding information. The Democrats who authored and released the report would like actual consequences to come to these people playing fast and loose with extremely sensitive data, but the people who currently hold the levers of power will likely dismiss it as some kind of fearmongering or "defending fraud" or similar such things. Wired has more in-depth reporting on the takeover, and the ways in which the current administration has attempted to obstruct transparency and accountability for the changes that the Elon team have been making, and the carelessness with which they treat the sensitive data.
We are again in the threat of shutdown season, because there are administration personnel who don't want things to happen, or who insist on certain things happening, and basically, it's all about getting their way and having the opposition cave. The administration has threatened to fire federal workers during a shutdown and not re-hire them when the shutdown ends,. which would further the administration's goals of dismantling the federal government and transforming it from a bureaucracy that keeps the country running into his personal arm of vengeance and favor.
The kidnapping squads attempted to force a father out of his house so that he could be kidnapped by refusing to release his five year-old daughter back to them unless he did what they wanted. Eventually, the local police were able to reunite parents and child without anyone having to be exposed to potential kidnapping, but then the father was kidnapped two days later by the kidnapping squads.
After an industrial explosion in a predominantly Black Louisiana town started killing trees and animals, the EPA, which had documented the extent of the damage done by the explosion, continued to insist that there's no threats to humans from the thing that is killing trees and animals. This administration has been consistent in their belief in the inhumanity of Black people, so there's a pretty good chance that when this EPA says there's no danger to humans, they're considering all the Black residents not humans, and therefore they don't have to care about harms to them. (They certainly haven't been thorough in their testing and discovery of the hazardous materials present in the soil and elsewhere. That might mean having to acknowledge something is dangerous.)
Republican state legislators in Michigan filed a bill that would ban all things that might come under a very broad brush of "pornography" and also ban depictions of trans people. While it's unlikely the bill will advance to any kind of vote for passage, it's an indication that the people who have been pushing for entirely foolish implementations of age verification will not stop at having that age verification enacted and will be interested in moving forward and banning anything they don't like in their state as inherently pornographic or unsuitable for children, including the existence of people. We expect that this proposed ban will have approximately the same effect and popularity as The Taliban leader who appears to have cut off broadband internet access to his province, citing the prevention of immorality as the cause. Although it seems to be that the mobile Internet infrastructure is still working, even if it is slow and not always reliable. (The headline for the linked article could be much clearer, as banning Wi-Fi is somewhat nonsensical, given that most internet is still delivered through cables and wires.)
MetaFilter, a long-running online forum and discussion space, makes the announcement that they have to block Mississippi IPs from accessing the site, because of the potential penalties from Mississippi's age-verification laws. We can hope that Netchoice wins their suit against the state for their blatantly federally unconstitutional law, and swiftly.
Emboldened by the stances the national government is taking and a general attitude of entitlement and that they will escape consequences for their actions, groups of men are targeting trans women for attacks. The linked article contains detailed descriptions of the assaults and their results happening in the Seattle area, which is mostly a barometer of "if it happens in a place people think is a liberal paradise, then it definitely happens elsewhere in the country." (Seattle, of course, is not a liberal paradise, any more than Southern California is, but "coastal elites and liberals" is a narrative that certain political parties and candidates gain leverage from exploiting.
Rudolph Giuliani has settled the lawsuit against him for his defamatory and slanderous statements claiming Dominion Voting Systems machines changed votes in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, but no details have yet been provided of the settlement. Elsewhere, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell was found to have defamed Smartmatic with his slanderous remarks that its machines were used to rig the 2020 United States Presidential Election. So, for both of these situations, it's taken literally another administration and civil processes to reach judgments and conclusions about statements made that were defamatory and slanderous at the time. (That said, both Smartmatic and Dominion have also won court cases and settlements against other entities that repeated, amplified, or made defamatory and slanderous (or libelous) statements of their own against the companies.)
Making a reader in the current era, says a book CEO, is about making reading important, allowing for focused time, and (wrongly) that reading should become a dialogic exercise. That last one pretty well makes the rest of the piece, which is quite good, less good than it could have been. It's a matter of professional agitation for me whenever someone offers advice about building readers that isn't "let kids read what they want, and then talk with them about what they're reading, without the intent of making it educational." Because I have to deal with so many of the situations where a grown-up has decided that there needs to be more "challenging" books, or that books with pictures in them are not sufficiently mature or high-enough level for where this child is supposed to be, and in doing so, they make the act of reading a chore instead of something that's supposed to be enjoyable. (And then they wonder why certain children lose interest in reading books over time, even though many of those children will still be engaged with texts, and lots of them, as they mature.)
The ways that women who speak out about their abuse are pretty consistent over time, as this 17th c. CE account of a woman writing tell-alls about her husband and the religious community that sheltered him and blamed her will attest.
The trend of influencers and beauty products often produces younglings intent on purchasing and using things that are not formulated or meant for them, often aided by grownups who don't understand or aren't interested in the potential consequences. And while the frame of the article is about the children, tweens, and teens who seem to want all the beauty product they can get their hands on, including those who want or need it because they know they'll be bullied otherwise, the article goes out of its way to describe the influencers, the official or unofficial branding and marketing that is appealing to the younger crowds, the disengagement from acts of parenting, and so many other things that are contributing that are all aimed at the kids, rather than trying to frame it as all these younglings who want what they don't understand and are trying to get it despite all the things telling them not to. Like the children are being victimized by forces intent on making as much money as possible.
A venture company has decided it wants to hold sperm races, and has obtained millions of dollars in funding for making this concept a reality. Which makes perfect sense for people who believe they have to measure up to the invisible and always perfection-demanding standards of toxic masculinity.
The current administration has said they will stop enforcing a rule put in place to ensure that if airlines damaged or destroyed a passenger's wheelchair, that passenger would be compensated for the damage. Because the companies complained that it wasn't fair that they had to actually treat someone's mobility device with care and would have to pay up if it wasn't, and this administration is all in on being dicks to disabled people as well as making sure that companies never have to do anything they don't want to do.
A successful gene therapy trial has resulted in the treatment of Huntington's Disease, providing a possible way to slow the progression of the degenerative disease by up to 75%. It'll be a long surgery to do the treatment, but there is at least a treatment potentially available. The treatment also uses a carrier virus to deliver the treatment, so I'm sure that someone, somewhere, is shrieking about how such a treatment will turn the people who receive it into lizard people.
A newborn kitten acquired on a long trail ride became a fast companion and helped allow people to be more generous to each other and the rider taking care of the kitten, various ways in which humans have been able to assist in preserving and stewarding the natural world, despite doomer feelings, and research that suggests some dogs can classify toys by function, as well as memorize the names of various toys. (And also lots of doggos with their toys.)
In technology, Samsung, having sold you a ridiculously expensive refrigerator with a screen built into it, is now saying that you also get to have advertisements played on the screen of your refrigerator, because when companies like that talk about value to customers, they mean the customers are the advertisers, and the rest of you, including the person who buys a refrigerator with a screen on it and then hooks it up to the Internet, are rubes.
A company already with a bad reputation among gaming folk, Electronic Arts, is being bought out by a partnership between the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake Partners, which is not going to endear them any more to gaming folk than they already are. Actually, wait. Given some of the online toxic culture of certain gaming folk, maybe this will improve EA's reputation some by knowing it's being owned by people more in line with their way of thinking.
some hands-on time with a children's companion powered by an LLM, which mostly seems to be that the conversational aspects of the toy don't go so well with the child, and the data harvesting ideas of the toy don't go over so great with the grownup writing the article about the chatbot toy. This is baffling to LLM developers and those that insist their products will be universally loved, because they rarely have worked with actual children to figure out what they want to do, and that they have yet to really understand that children will play with the cardboard box in the same way that a cat will disregard the toy gotten for it in favor of the packaging.
Those of us who work with the public on the regular, however, have been seriously cursing out the developers of LLMs for a long time. Your local librarian, public or academic, has likely been asked to find books that don't exist, because an LLM made up something that seemed plausible as a source for its assertion, which we all got a taste of when the Chicago paper published the summer reading supplement full of books that didn't exist, even if the authors did. This is one of the dangers of LLM usage that hits most immediately for most people, that the "answer" they received was wrong, but subtly wrong enough that they couldn't immediately tell that it was wrong. Not that telling an LLM it's wrong will change anything about it.
That ability to churn out plausible-sounding items in endless variations means that LLMs are the perfect scam and phishing generation tools, as well, even though they're supposedly not supposed to create such things.
Google, the corporation, has decided they want to integrate their Gemini LLM into everything they can, including the Chrome web browser, because that's the kind of thing that will make Google money, even as it will likely cause more headaches and issues for others.
the Bluesky network announced some community guideline changes that are cracking down significantly on things that might appear to be nonconsensual acts, even in forms where it would be impossible to say that the art created was of real people. As is often the case, people who want to showcase their art, even if the art itself depicts difficult situations or id-fantasies, or even just what someone asked them to make in exchange for currency, keep getting run out of places to do so. One wonders if this also is a result of payment processors putting pressure on Bluesky to avoid controversial content so they can fund their operations with advertising dollars.
While Bluesky may be swinging too far in the direction of censoring everything, even things they wouldn't need to, the Grok LLM that Elon Musk is trying to create is creating issues for its data annotators and tutors as users ask it for NSFW content, including potential image generation or story generation of CSAM. The tutors, since they're basically content moderators for Grok, have to deal with all the same things that content moderators for other sites do. But this doesn't seem to bother the Grok folks, as they continue to quest for people with experience in things like adult films to review audio conversations and text materials, thinking that they can create something more akin to the stereotypical nerd's idea of an interface while somehow managing to avoid generating content that would be illegal.
Complicating all of this is at least one of the LLM companies admitting that there's no way to actually prevent a model based on statistical probabilities from doing something that you don't want it to at least some of the time. Even if their training data is perfect and factual, the nature of the LLM means that at times it will put together strings of words that are plausible when read but entirely factually incorrect. And because the models have been developed to be definitive (because people trust answers delivered with confidence, even when they're not correct) rather than to hedge, the problem gets magnified. The solutions presented that involve things like human intervention, of course, would mean that an LLM is going to be more expensive and less effective than a human in the same job. (So you should just hire the human, which is what no CEO actually wants to do,.)
Because, after all, you don't need an LLM to make the decision to use publicly-posted pictures of schoolgirls in uniform to tempt older men to join your services, as the company that controls Facebook, Instagram, and Threads has done. The company in charge of that says that of course they would never advertise the accounts or pictures posted by teenagers, but because the pictures were posted by their parents on their parental accounts, that means the pictures were perfectly fine to use as advertising material for others. No doubt, the process of collecting, categorizing, and choosing those pictures as advertising was automated, and the human controls over it were mostly someone thinking that such things would be appealing to a a specific demographic. Assuming there were any human controls at all, which is also doubtful.
Last out, the ways in which our understanding of classical Greek depends on the surviving texts that we have to work with, and therefore while sometimes a word does mean dildo, other times, it does not.
Yacht Club Games on the development of modes for Shovel Knight that allow for different-bodied designs and pronoun usage, and a good decision made by them to decouple body designs and gendered pronouns.
And a story of corvids who help break the cages around their fellows. Be gay, do crow. And, perhaps, show solidarity by demonstrating how foolish it is to require girls to declare they're "biological females" before they can play in sport. (While the article quotes someone saying it's foolish not only require girls to do this and not boys, and that girls teams are suffering because they can't field enough affirmed players, the real meat is from the teachers saying it's not fair to require this, and the athletes who are also choosing not to participate because of fairness issues.)
(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.)
The still-apparently-novel concept that people who have systems tuned toward novelty and curiosity might be beneficial to current society (instead of only the hunter-gatherers) and that environments made for others are not helpful to them.
The Archive of Our Own reminds us that they are dealing with an influx of spam accounts that leave generic praise comments and then offer to discuss off-site things like making fanart for your story. Part of it is that such commercial solicitation is barred on the Archive, but the easiest way to spot it, other than the invitation offsite, is that the comment itself doesn't have anything specific about the story. It's usually posted to the most recent story that's available. And some of these spammers are creating AO3 accounts to spam with, so disabling guest comments won't necessarily protect you from receiving them.
Nostalgia for times where scarcity required planning and people got a certain thrill out of the act of chasing things and not knowing whether their selections would turn out to be good ones. I am more inclined not to be nostalgic for that, but to be annoyed at the way that the expertise of the record clerk, the librarian, and the bookstore buyer are being devalued in favor of machines that their promoters claim have intelligence and can do all of those things a human can do, and better.
Robert Redford, actor, director, and well-known environmental activist, has left the world at 89 years of age. He is also responsible for the body that produces the annual Sundance Film Festival.
Anonymous art creators have unveiled a statue of the current administrator and known child trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein holding hands, celebrating their friendship, and using the text of the administrator's birthday note to Epstein as commentary. You know, that text that strongly suggests that the two of them share an interest in pederasty and molestation of women and young girls, buttressed by some of the public statements the administrator has made about his interest in such. (As well as having been found liable for sexual assault earlier on in his life.)
After having complained mightily about a stopped escalator and wonky teleprompter during his visit to the United Nations, the administrator was required to look for another excuse to blame the UN for when it was clear his own team were responsible for his mishaps.
There was an opportunity for reality to intrude upon the administrator, as he seemed to realize that what he was being fed in his media streams was not what was actually happening in Portland, Oregon. This realization will last about as long as it takes for his media streams to swallow him back up again and his sycophants to return to requesting the deployment of excessive force to left-leaning cities and states in a campaign of intimidation and terror against those who don't want to fall in line with him.
The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel's late-night television program was very short-lived, with reinstatement happening just after the weekend where Kimmel was suspended based on manufactured outrage at his comments on the Charlie Kirk murder, and significant interference and threats from the FCC head that if Disney didn't suspend Kimmel, he would retaliate against the company and their licensees. The threat had some teeth because Sinclair Broadcasting (the ones who forced their local anchors to read national scripts about conservative subjects Sinclair wanted washed through them) and Nexstar, another conglomeration with a merger before the FCC to become even bigger and have more control over the broadcast television in the country, said they would not carry Kimmel's show even if he were allowed to continue making it. Under pressure from the people who watch Sinclair and Nexstar stations and don't want those companies censoring and controlling what they watch, Sinclair and Nexstar relented and will carry Kimmel again. They claimed that their decision to remove the programming had nothing to do with government influence and interaction, and they could very well be correct about that, as Sinclair and Nexstar are already friendly to this administration, so they wouldn't need an FCC threat against them to do what the administration wants.
While Kimmel is high-profile and produced most of the outrage, accurate commentary on Kirk has resulted in many other persons being removed from their jobs and they have not received nearly as much fury and indignation at their firings. So now that Kimmel's back on the air, that rage should turn to ensuring that others who were dismissed because of their accurate comments also get back on the air.
The comments that remain accurate about Kirk and his legacy are certainly not disproven when at his memorial service, an administration aide embraced the idea that his side is all about white supremacy, and laying claim to being the true inheritors of Greece and Rome, and that they intend to make Charlie Kirk into a martyr for their cause, and to use his death as the excuse for furthering and intensifying the hatred and destruction they were already planning on doing. That hagiography will rely on removing things that will always be true about what Kirk said and in inserting things that are untrue about the person (or shadowy cabal) that killed Kirk. There is no evidence, for example, that the alleged killer was part of any militant left-wing organizations, even though the administration is trying to erase the facts that right-wing alignment tends to result in more extremist attacks and domestic terror than left-wing alignment. More and more, it looks like the alleged killer did what he's alleged to have done because of the things that Charlie Kirk said and did, and the threats he saw from that to people that he loved.
The assassination and subsequent manhunt also revealed just how much law enforcement is already in your social media, without having to necessarily ask for a warrant to surveil you. Of course, this also reminds me that some people elsewhere have composed jaunty rhymes to help someone identify which person in their social circle is likely to be the government plant or informant.
And, in case you were curious, there were two more instances of mass violence, both of them with decent indicators that the perpetrators were deeply into funhouse versions of reality popular in right-wing circles. But these are, of course, not part of any systemic indication. Only left-wing violence is allowed to be systemic in this administration.
The recently dismissed head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified to a Congressional hearing that her dismissal was predicated on her unwillingness to provide blanket approval, in advance, for the upcoming recommendations of a vaccination council that has had all the medical professionals dismissed and replaced with vaccine skeptics. The Health and Human Services Secretary testified earlier that he had asked her, point-blank, if she was trustworthy, and she had said she wasn't, which strains credulity to believe that has happened. The Director's testimony said that the Health and Human Services Secretary told her that he didn't trust her, and she suggested that if he didn't trust her, he could fire her. The Director paints the HHS secretary as looking for rubber stamps for his and the President's agenda, instead of following and recommending what medical professionals and scientists recommend. I'm more inclined to believe the Director, but that's mostly because I have heard many of the public statements of the HHS Secretary, and he seems exactly the kind of person that his detractors and opponents said he was.
Emboldened by the anti-vaccination stances of the HHS Secretary, and several other public health officials who seem to think they are stewards of the freedom to die from preventable, easily communicable diseases rather than custodians of a robust public health, more parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children, and as a consequence, childhood vaccination rates are plummeting across the United States, some below the minimum percentages needed to achieve "herd immunity". (There's also some amount of "lower-income folks and those who can't easily get their children to a place providing vaccines have trouble keeping up with the vaccinations," which could be solved with any number of social insurance programs, or funding vaccination clinics at the schools, or making it mandatory that employers give paid time off for workers to ensure their children are immunized and able to see medics, or any number of things that the "freedom" party generally detests as an imposition on the rights of a boss to do with their workers whatever they want.)
The current administrator proclaimed something with a mountain of evidence and scientific study that says what was spoken was bullshit. Which is not just about spouting bullshit, but spouting eugenicist bullshit that is intended to frame disability as worse than death, and that the disabled are deserving of death to "free" them from their disability, as well as a framing that says someone should harm themselves during pregnancy rather than take an effective pain reliever and fever reducer that doesn't have the potential of bad effects on the developing fetus.
If you are still in a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic (and if you're reading this contemporaneously, you likely are), the use of H1 and H2 antihistamines continues appearing useful as part of a multi-faceted defense against infection of the virus. Mostly by keeping the preferred way of the virus getting attached to your cells busy doing something else instead. It does work better when combined with other methods of preventing infection and transmission, and, of course, we cannot emphasize enough, take all the rest that your body is telling you to do. (Even though we know that for many of you, you don't actually have enough sick time in your bank, assuming you have a sick time bank, to take all the necessary rest days toward recovery, because your employer wishes to extract profit from you in the same way that your landlord does.)
Psychiatric hospitals have requirements to provide services to those in emergency and urgent care needs, but some are discharging those patients before they are stabilized, and the federal government is not doing its diligence in making sure that those hospitals that violate the law are appropriately disciplined and brought back into compliance. Unsurprisingly, that particular arm has been targeted for significant budget cuts and had their personnel reduced by the Elon team and others who believe that accountability services should only be seen as budget savings. And the hospitals that are discharging the patients are often doing so because their insurance companies won't pay for care, and the profit-seekers running the hospitals don't want to have to pony up for uncompensated care. The law is clear on these matters, but the records are likely to be fudged or forged or otherwise brought into harmony with what the insurance company will do, rather than what the patient actually needs. (So, y'know, another argument for taxpayer-funded medicine is that there's no longer a need to worry about how insurance company profits or hospital profits will prevent someone from receiving proper care.)
A Congressional report released continues to support whistleblower claims that the Elon Musk team has access to the entirety of the Social Security numbers, and is currently storing those numbers on a cloud server that is insufficiently protected and hardened against criminal hacks. The database also has other information that would make it trivially easy to engage in identity theft with the database and corresponding information. The Democrats who authored and released the report would like actual consequences to come to these people playing fast and loose with extremely sensitive data, but the people who currently hold the levers of power will likely dismiss it as some kind of fearmongering or "defending fraud" or similar such things. Wired has more in-depth reporting on the takeover, and the ways in which the current administration has attempted to obstruct transparency and accountability for the changes that the Elon team have been making, and the carelessness with which they treat the sensitive data.
We are again in the threat of shutdown season, because there are administration personnel who don't want things to happen, or who insist on certain things happening, and basically, it's all about getting their way and having the opposition cave. The administration has threatened to fire federal workers during a shutdown and not re-hire them when the shutdown ends,. which would further the administration's goals of dismantling the federal government and transforming it from a bureaucracy that keeps the country running into his personal arm of vengeance and favor.
The kidnapping squads attempted to force a father out of his house so that he could be kidnapped by refusing to release his five year-old daughter back to them unless he did what they wanted. Eventually, the local police were able to reunite parents and child without anyone having to be exposed to potential kidnapping, but then the father was kidnapped two days later by the kidnapping squads.
After an industrial explosion in a predominantly Black Louisiana town started killing trees and animals, the EPA, which had documented the extent of the damage done by the explosion, continued to insist that there's no threats to humans from the thing that is killing trees and animals. This administration has been consistent in their belief in the inhumanity of Black people, so there's a pretty good chance that when this EPA says there's no danger to humans, they're considering all the Black residents not humans, and therefore they don't have to care about harms to them. (They certainly haven't been thorough in their testing and discovery of the hazardous materials present in the soil and elsewhere. That might mean having to acknowledge something is dangerous.)
Republican state legislators in Michigan filed a bill that would ban all things that might come under a very broad brush of "pornography" and also ban depictions of trans people. While it's unlikely the bill will advance to any kind of vote for passage, it's an indication that the people who have been pushing for entirely foolish implementations of age verification will not stop at having that age verification enacted and will be interested in moving forward and banning anything they don't like in their state as inherently pornographic or unsuitable for children, including the existence of people. We expect that this proposed ban will have approximately the same effect and popularity as The Taliban leader who appears to have cut off broadband internet access to his province, citing the prevention of immorality as the cause. Although it seems to be that the mobile Internet infrastructure is still working, even if it is slow and not always reliable. (The headline for the linked article could be much clearer, as banning Wi-Fi is somewhat nonsensical, given that most internet is still delivered through cables and wires.)
MetaFilter, a long-running online forum and discussion space, makes the announcement that they have to block Mississippi IPs from accessing the site, because of the potential penalties from Mississippi's age-verification laws. We can hope that Netchoice wins their suit against the state for their blatantly federally unconstitutional law, and swiftly.
Emboldened by the stances the national government is taking and a general attitude of entitlement and that they will escape consequences for their actions, groups of men are targeting trans women for attacks. The linked article contains detailed descriptions of the assaults and their results happening in the Seattle area, which is mostly a barometer of "if it happens in a place people think is a liberal paradise, then it definitely happens elsewhere in the country." (Seattle, of course, is not a liberal paradise, any more than Southern California is, but "coastal elites and liberals" is a narrative that certain political parties and candidates gain leverage from exploiting.
Rudolph Giuliani has settled the lawsuit against him for his defamatory and slanderous statements claiming Dominion Voting Systems machines changed votes in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, but no details have yet been provided of the settlement. Elsewhere, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell was found to have defamed Smartmatic with his slanderous remarks that its machines were used to rig the 2020 United States Presidential Election. So, for both of these situations, it's taken literally another administration and civil processes to reach judgments and conclusions about statements made that were defamatory and slanderous at the time. (That said, both Smartmatic and Dominion have also won court cases and settlements against other entities that repeated, amplified, or made defamatory and slanderous (or libelous) statements of their own against the companies.)
Making a reader in the current era, says a book CEO, is about making reading important, allowing for focused time, and (wrongly) that reading should become a dialogic exercise. That last one pretty well makes the rest of the piece, which is quite good, less good than it could have been. It's a matter of professional agitation for me whenever someone offers advice about building readers that isn't "let kids read what they want, and then talk with them about what they're reading, without the intent of making it educational." Because I have to deal with so many of the situations where a grown-up has decided that there needs to be more "challenging" books, or that books with pictures in them are not sufficiently mature or high-enough level for where this child is supposed to be, and in doing so, they make the act of reading a chore instead of something that's supposed to be enjoyable. (And then they wonder why certain children lose interest in reading books over time, even though many of those children will still be engaged with texts, and lots of them, as they mature.)
The ways that women who speak out about their abuse are pretty consistent over time, as this 17th c. CE account of a woman writing tell-alls about her husband and the religious community that sheltered him and blamed her will attest.
The trend of influencers and beauty products often produces younglings intent on purchasing and using things that are not formulated or meant for them, often aided by grownups who don't understand or aren't interested in the potential consequences. And while the frame of the article is about the children, tweens, and teens who seem to want all the beauty product they can get their hands on, including those who want or need it because they know they'll be bullied otherwise, the article goes out of its way to describe the influencers, the official or unofficial branding and marketing that is appealing to the younger crowds, the disengagement from acts of parenting, and so many other things that are contributing that are all aimed at the kids, rather than trying to frame it as all these younglings who want what they don't understand and are trying to get it despite all the things telling them not to. Like the children are being victimized by forces intent on making as much money as possible.
A venture company has decided it wants to hold sperm races, and has obtained millions of dollars in funding for making this concept a reality. Which makes perfect sense for people who believe they have to measure up to the invisible and always perfection-demanding standards of toxic masculinity.
The current administration has said they will stop enforcing a rule put in place to ensure that if airlines damaged or destroyed a passenger's wheelchair, that passenger would be compensated for the damage. Because the companies complained that it wasn't fair that they had to actually treat someone's mobility device with care and would have to pay up if it wasn't, and this administration is all in on being dicks to disabled people as well as making sure that companies never have to do anything they don't want to do.
A successful gene therapy trial has resulted in the treatment of Huntington's Disease, providing a possible way to slow the progression of the degenerative disease by up to 75%. It'll be a long surgery to do the treatment, but there is at least a treatment potentially available. The treatment also uses a carrier virus to deliver the treatment, so I'm sure that someone, somewhere, is shrieking about how such a treatment will turn the people who receive it into lizard people.
A newborn kitten acquired on a long trail ride became a fast companion and helped allow people to be more generous to each other and the rider taking care of the kitten, various ways in which humans have been able to assist in preserving and stewarding the natural world, despite doomer feelings, and research that suggests some dogs can classify toys by function, as well as memorize the names of various toys. (And also lots of doggos with their toys.)
In technology, Samsung, having sold you a ridiculously expensive refrigerator with a screen built into it, is now saying that you also get to have advertisements played on the screen of your refrigerator, because when companies like that talk about value to customers, they mean the customers are the advertisers, and the rest of you, including the person who buys a refrigerator with a screen on it and then hooks it up to the Internet, are rubes.
A company already with a bad reputation among gaming folk, Electronic Arts, is being bought out by a partnership between the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake Partners, which is not going to endear them any more to gaming folk than they already are. Actually, wait. Given some of the online toxic culture of certain gaming folk, maybe this will improve EA's reputation some by knowing it's being owned by people more in line with their way of thinking.
some hands-on time with a children's companion powered by an LLM, which mostly seems to be that the conversational aspects of the toy don't go so well with the child, and the data harvesting ideas of the toy don't go over so great with the grownup writing the article about the chatbot toy. This is baffling to LLM developers and those that insist their products will be universally loved, because they rarely have worked with actual children to figure out what they want to do, and that they have yet to really understand that children will play with the cardboard box in the same way that a cat will disregard the toy gotten for it in favor of the packaging.
Those of us who work with the public on the regular, however, have been seriously cursing out the developers of LLMs for a long time. Your local librarian, public or academic, has likely been asked to find books that don't exist, because an LLM made up something that seemed plausible as a source for its assertion, which we all got a taste of when the Chicago paper published the summer reading supplement full of books that didn't exist, even if the authors did. This is one of the dangers of LLM usage that hits most immediately for most people, that the "answer" they received was wrong, but subtly wrong enough that they couldn't immediately tell that it was wrong. Not that telling an LLM it's wrong will change anything about it.
That ability to churn out plausible-sounding items in endless variations means that LLMs are the perfect scam and phishing generation tools, as well, even though they're supposedly not supposed to create such things.
Google, the corporation, has decided they want to integrate their Gemini LLM into everything they can, including the Chrome web browser, because that's the kind of thing that will make Google money, even as it will likely cause more headaches and issues for others.
the Bluesky network announced some community guideline changes that are cracking down significantly on things that might appear to be nonconsensual acts, even in forms where it would be impossible to say that the art created was of real people. As is often the case, people who want to showcase their art, even if the art itself depicts difficult situations or id-fantasies, or even just what someone asked them to make in exchange for currency, keep getting run out of places to do so. One wonders if this also is a result of payment processors putting pressure on Bluesky to avoid controversial content so they can fund their operations with advertising dollars.
While Bluesky may be swinging too far in the direction of censoring everything, even things they wouldn't need to, the Grok LLM that Elon Musk is trying to create is creating issues for its data annotators and tutors as users ask it for NSFW content, including potential image generation or story generation of CSAM. The tutors, since they're basically content moderators for Grok, have to deal with all the same things that content moderators for other sites do. But this doesn't seem to bother the Grok folks, as they continue to quest for people with experience in things like adult films to review audio conversations and text materials, thinking that they can create something more akin to the stereotypical nerd's idea of an interface while somehow managing to avoid generating content that would be illegal.
Complicating all of this is at least one of the LLM companies admitting that there's no way to actually prevent a model based on statistical probabilities from doing something that you don't want it to at least some of the time. Even if their training data is perfect and factual, the nature of the LLM means that at times it will put together strings of words that are plausible when read but entirely factually incorrect. And because the models have been developed to be definitive (because people trust answers delivered with confidence, even when they're not correct) rather than to hedge, the problem gets magnified. The solutions presented that involve things like human intervention, of course, would mean that an LLM is going to be more expensive and less effective than a human in the same job. (So you should just hire the human, which is what no CEO actually wants to do,.)
Because, after all, you don't need an LLM to make the decision to use publicly-posted pictures of schoolgirls in uniform to tempt older men to join your services, as the company that controls Facebook, Instagram, and Threads has done. The company in charge of that says that of course they would never advertise the accounts or pictures posted by teenagers, but because the pictures were posted by their parents on their parental accounts, that means the pictures were perfectly fine to use as advertising material for others. No doubt, the process of collecting, categorizing, and choosing those pictures as advertising was automated, and the human controls over it were mostly someone thinking that such things would be appealing to a a specific demographic. Assuming there were any human controls at all, which is also doubtful.
Last out, the ways in which our understanding of classical Greek depends on the surviving texts that we have to work with, and therefore while sometimes a word does mean dildo, other times, it does not.
Yacht Club Games on the development of modes for Shovel Knight that allow for different-bodied designs and pronoun usage, and a good decision made by them to decouple body designs and gendered pronouns.
And a story of corvids who help break the cages around their fellows. Be gay, do crow. And, perhaps, show solidarity by demonstrating how foolish it is to require girls to declare they're "biological females" before they can play in sport. (While the article quotes someone saying it's foolish not only require girls to do this and not boys, and that girls teams are suffering because they can't field enough affirmed players, the real meat is from the teachers saying it's not fair to require this, and the athletes who are also choosing not to participate because of fairness issues.)
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
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Date: 2025-10-02 11:02 pm (UTC)