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silveradeptGood day. Let's begin with 144 hours of DDR to make a record.
Early hominids appear to have not only used tools, but passed that knowledge down through the generations. Which will evolve the understanding of the earliest ancestors of the human species, as science is wont to do.
If you haven't received a flu vaccine for this year, it might be a good idea to do so, even if the protection might not be ideal because of a new mutation showing up after the formulation had been decided.
The complete history of the nation must be preserved, and that means a lot of places are trying to keep and digitize the collections of Black newspapers and broadsheets they have in their collections.
Also, Dick Cheney is no longer able to create a more terrible world, having died at 84 years of age. If his name is invoked from here on out, it should be as a warning not to do what he did.
A.R. Moxon, verified duck, on the ways that the current conservative and fascist movement has made it their mission to not care, and to actively find ways to shift the burden of care to others, so that they have immunity to shame, as well.
They're definitely for the restoration of racist history so that everyone else has to see them praise racists, and they're happy to interview people who are racists, fascists, and who like to spread conspiracy theories of the same (and then defend them from critcism from all places on the political spectrum, because declaring someone out of bounds means that you might find yourself in the same place).
They certainly have no compulsions about shame, and often, of law, when they make demands of people who work for them. A court has ruled that changing furloughed employees' out-of-office emails to blame Democrats for the government shutdown was a violation of their free speech rights, but that doesn't mean they'll be back at it again for whatever the next thing is they want to use the civil service as their mouthpieces for.
That continued lack of caring results in brownshirts invading day care facilities to kidnap a worker there, because lack of caring also means not caring about whether or not young children see the state's violence performed in front of them. And, of course, such an uncaring environment allows for other uncaring people to flourish, like the criminals who pose as the brownshirts and use the fact that the brownshirts refuse to identify themselves in meaningful ways to their advantage.
(That said, when someone protested the brownshirts by lobbing a sandwich at them, a grand jury refused to return an indictment, and the jury convened for the misdemeanor trial returned a not guilty verdict. So.)
Because they are ghouls, they don't think of the people who rely on programs like nutritional assistance as actual people, instead hosting a party themed on the last period of great excess, the 1920s, on the eve of the expiry of nutritional assistance benefits for millions. Then, when receiving pushback and federal court demands to fund the program, they maliciously complied, saying they'd only use enough funds to fund benefits at 50% of the allotments, which then produced more demands and court orders to properly fund the program. Which the majority of the Supreme Court immediately put on hold on, because they don't have to care that while this gets wrangled in the courts, of course, people go hungry, because SNAP is often an essential part of their food budget for the month.
Because they don't care about what the costs of being a non-rich person are, the administration has scuttled the Internal Revenue Service's Direct File program, which piloted last year as a free and online way for regular people to file their taxes electronically, using data the IRS already collects. Senator Wyden, general knowledgeable and level-headed about such things, lambasted the administration for choosing to favor tax preparation companies and software, rather than the robust and working Direct File program.
Because they don't care about the benefits of a society where the full diversity of people are allowed to flourish, the majority of the Supreme Court of the United States allowed the administration to constrain passports so that they have a "sex" marker that displays their sex at birth, instead of a gender identity or what someone's sex may be at that moment. (Which, of course, doesn't account for intersex or other people whose sex doesn't land squarely in a binary.) And the administration has said they will deny visa applications to people who don't meet an arbitrary standard of thinness, taking refuge in medical fatphobia and "worries" that fat people might be a drain on the U.S. healthcare system.
On the topic of diversity, did we mention lately that the vice-administrator repeatedly says that he wants his wife to convert to his religion, instead of having kept hers? But that he's apparently okay with her not-conversion so far. That might be because the kids are going to a religious school of his religion and being raised in his religion, and therefore he probably believes there's no chance that they might instead want to follow their mother's religious practices instead. (Boy, what a blow to his fragile masculinity that might be.) Of course, there's also the part where his embrace of the recently widowed wife of the Turning Point USA founded after his assassination seemed to be much less about comforting someone in their grief and more about something else, so if in the future, it turns out that the marriage isn't as stable, or he isn't as tolerant as he appeared, there will be at least one person pointing to this situation and saying "Told you." (Given that the administrator is very much a sex pest, and has been adjudicated as such, it probably wouldn't be that much more of a stretch to find out that the vice-administrator also has that particular vice, even if not to the pederastic tastes that the administrator's close association with Epstein might suggest.)
And because they've been effective at removing shame as something that affects them, even if they're still attuned to what other people's shame might mean in terms of political will, even as it becomes abundantly clear that the current administrator has always been a great friend of a known pederast and sex trafficker, even when he was in office before, the standard reaction to this information is deny, deny, deny, claim it's a hoax or a witch-hunt, and never ever accept reality.
They don't care about all the children who have already died to gun violence, and they don't care about the ones who will do so in the future.
They're also aided by media outlets more than ready to parrot their talking points about feminism and wash it into a veneer of respectability, and a viewpoint that strongly tries to replace any internal standards for self-worth or success with external ones that have neither upper nor lower bounds, so that we will keep engaging with the market, whether as buyer or seller, in a desperate hope to get our self-worth to where we want it to be.
The current administration has decided that they're not interested in allowing most refugees to the United States, in flagrant defiance of precedent and one of the bedrock ideals that most people believe about the U.S., and instead will focus on a small group of South Africans they think of as "refugees."
And, of course, while most Democrats held the line on making sure that health care costs wouldn't spike precipitously for the people who would have to bear them the most, 8 Senators who claim to be Democrats decided they didn't care, and voted with the Republicans to provide government funding again without any of the things that should have been guaranteed before any such bills were passed.
The people they're appealing to are the kind of people who engage in collective masturbation while trying to view as much pornographic content as possible, and specifically the kind of content telling them they're worthless and will only ever be a worthless person masturbating. I won't say there's a causal relationship, but I wouldn't be surprised if these are also the kind of men who have been receiving messages from day one that they will never achieve masculinity, but they must defend its most toxic form against all comers if they want a hope of a chance. (The writer complains that it seems more and more like "toxic" and "masculinity" are inexorably linked, and that drives people to be toxic, which should be treated with similar derision as "Well, you kept calling me a Nazi, which offends me, and so I will behave even more like a Nazi becuase you keep trying to shame me for doing it." They do get better, though, and land on the correct argument of "Hey, we need prominent alternatives to manosphere influencers that pretend to care to get you buying their products.") The kind of people who asked early on in their lives, and then later on in their lives, as well, why they keep getting rejected by women, and then not listening to the people in their lives telling them the answer to that question, repeatedly.
Surprising a fair number of people, The Supereme Court of the United States declined to hear a challenge asking them to review and re-decide their decision on Obergefell v. Hodges. Although this was initially presented as a more formal challenge, or perhaps as a new case that could throw out the older one, it seems the petition was much more limited in scope, and the justices are not likely to overturn a decision they already made. At least, not without significantly more change to the court, or someone giving them a better excuse to do it with. So, while this might not have been as hair-on-fire as it originally looked, it's certainly likely that given a better excuse, the Court would certainly seriously consider overturning Obergefell.
The full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to the United States ruled that policies calling the intentional misgendering of transgender students bullying are not allowed, but schools are allowed to stop cis students from being bullied by intentional misgendering, because apparently misgendering a cis student is referring to their "physical characteristics", but misgendering a trans student is permitted because the harm of a cis student being punished for their "scientific or religious beliefs" outweighs the harm to the trans student for, y'know, being bullied.
The state of Texas' Attorney General is suing the current and previous makers of the drug named Tylenol, claiming deceptive practices and citing the nonexistent link between the drug and autism pulled out of thin air by the federal administrator as definitive proof of the truth of his accusation.
On other tiers of politics, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani as its mayor, because he ran on a platform that appealed to the not-rich residents of the City, and because his chief opponent was a disgraced former governor. I hope that he'll get the opportunity to enact his promises, and that we'll see New York City thrive from it. For now, though, all of his opponents seem to be running out the usual tropes - a Red Scare, Islamophobia, and the rest.
The voters of the state of California gave approval to have their congressional districts redrawn so as to blunt the influence of other states that are doing the same with the express purposes of creating a permanent Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
The voters of the state of Colorado passed two propositions to fund school meals for all Colorado public school students, a timely and important act to do in the middle of the federal dickery about nutrition assistance, but also, a humane thing to do and one that will likely reap some academic benefits.
The union behind ProPublica is demanding a fair contract for their workers. The Condé Nast union, who work for publications including Teen Vogue and WIRED, have been trying to undo the damage caused when the company consolidated Teen Vogue and then fired almost all of their non-white staff. The publisher has now filed a complaint against the union for what they claim are breaches of the bargaining agreement. (Which might very well have been something as innocuous as "asking them to not do the racist thing they're doing.")
It becomes very difficult for a young adult to build independence skills and experience when there are still adults in their life that are trying to manage that life. The pendulum has swung in the other direction, then, from an ethos that suggests that intervening only when absolutely necessary is the right way to raise children toward one that says stepping in early and often is the way to go. I'm sure we'll arrive at some synthesis eventually, where there's an agreement about which kinds of situations require an adult immediately and which ones are best left for children and young adults to fend for themselves over, but I don't think we're there yet.
exercising hunting dogs by having then chase cross-country runners until they catch them. Much better than the foxhunts that used to happen with them in times past.
In technology, remember that even your library lending apps, like Libby, might contain unwanted AI. A recommendation service is almost one of those things that machine learning could be good at, if it could consider and interpolate all the possible points of data and return good matches, and then fuzz those so that people get the occasional recommendation of something that they might be interested in, but might not discover on their own. That said, current models that machine recommendations use generally tend to suck. There's a lot to being able to find the right book for a human, and much of it is not currently quantifiable.
Jon Scalzi on how inaccurate the LLM slop fueled by the fascist's belief in his own mighty penis, err, coding skills, are, when it comes to a subject he has intimate knowledge of: himself.
Not that the obvious failures of the companies he's bought, and the LLM that he's trying to roll out as a general-purpose AI, has stopped the Tesla shareholders from giving him an executive compensation package worth $1 trillion USD, assuming he can meet the targets outlined in the package. The approval comes amidst threats from the CEO that he would leave the company if his extortion deal wasn't approved.
The United States military is being fleeced by contractors who write into their contracts that only they are allowed to repair the equipment they sell. If pushback can succeed for the people who are out killing others and projecting hegemony, maybe we can demand that the rest of us deserve the right to repair our own tech, too.
A specific company is acting as a copyright troll, claiming in lawsuits that specific people have downloaded adult content, but, as with other such things, the technology they use to determine who the person downloading supposedly uses, at best, guesswork. The company basically bets that nobody is going to want to take a suit to trial about the possibility of having downloaded adult content, and therefore usually settles with their targets, rather than anything else. Which is, to put it mildly, the kind of behavior that is supposed to be associated with the casting couch, rather than someone doing serious work trying to find infringement.
In similarly scummy behavior, GoFundMe created donation pages for more than a million nonprofits without asking their consent, so they could skim a "tip" for themselves from the donation that someone was making to the charity, as well as a transaction fee on top of the processing fees. Once someone called them on it from a news organization, the company issued an apology and did what they should have done in the first place - removed the generated pages that haven't been claimed by those nonprofits. For those that claimed them and want to delist them, though, GoFundMe still makes them complete a verification process to delist.
And, of course, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads just straight-up relied on the profits they made from selling ad space on their platforms to people they knew were running scams to fund their LLM development. That's billions of dollars for the company to knowingly allow scams to run on their platforms. The company, of course, claims that it removes those ads as it finds them, and that nobody actually wants them on the platform except for the scammers.
The current drive for computer components to build datacenters that can hold and run LLMs is causing the prices of memory to spike, in the same way that all the people trying to buy up high-end video cards to turn them into bitcoin miners spiked the prices of the video cards to unaffordable levels for anyone who wanted to do something simple like play a game.
Youtube doesn't want people to know about the various ways you can install Windows 11 that aren't the official Microsoft way. And, of course, when asked to provide a reason why, there was only boilerplate and the underlying assumption that computers were responsible and the humans had no agency to override them.
Someone managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call held by the company Cellebrite, who manufacture and offer tools to hack smartphones, and posted some of the information from the call. Supposedly, Cellebrite offers their tools to law enforcement, who often find themselves in the situation of confronting a locked device and not having obtained sufficient permission to search the devices, and would rather not bother with court requirements, or the stringent rules against self-incrimination. So.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has demanded information about the owner of the archive.is domain, likely to prosecute them for felony contempt of business model, since the archive.is snapshotting software is regularly used by visitors to the site to bypass the paywalls on various sites, since it accepts whatever URL is put into it without requiring any kind of verification that the person making the request is authorized to have the archive copy made. As usual, useful tools will be attacked and buried by those who profit from rent-seeking rather than from being better at capitalism.
Studies continue to suggest that the sounds of traffic and other loud activities common to all kinds of urbanized, car-centric areas are detrimental to our health.
A discovery of tape being cleaned out may have unearthed a complete copy of the fourth version of Bell Labs' UNIX, for which no complete copy is currently known to exist. If they can get the tape to work, and the tape is in sufficiently good condition, that might patch a hole in the understanding of the evolution of that operating system. Which is pretty cool, even if the value of it is in patching that hole, instead of some other thing.
Last out for tonight, an eyesore with a bad caricature and Randian-libertarian messaging is now providing a better message, since the land and the billboard were bought by the local Native nation.
And research now suggests that humans do instinctively work to help each other, rather than passively watch others be hurt, especially in emergency situations.
(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.)
Early hominids appear to have not only used tools, but passed that knowledge down through the generations. Which will evolve the understanding of the earliest ancestors of the human species, as science is wont to do.
If you haven't received a flu vaccine for this year, it might be a good idea to do so, even if the protection might not be ideal because of a new mutation showing up after the formulation had been decided.
The complete history of the nation must be preserved, and that means a lot of places are trying to keep and digitize the collections of Black newspapers and broadsheets they have in their collections.
Also, Dick Cheney is no longer able to create a more terrible world, having died at 84 years of age. If his name is invoked from here on out, it should be as a warning not to do what he did.
A.R. Moxon, verified duck, on the ways that the current conservative and fascist movement has made it their mission to not care, and to actively find ways to shift the burden of care to others, so that they have immunity to shame, as well.
They're definitely for the restoration of racist history so that everyone else has to see them praise racists, and they're happy to interview people who are racists, fascists, and who like to spread conspiracy theories of the same (and then defend them from critcism from all places on the political spectrum, because declaring someone out of bounds means that you might find yourself in the same place).
They certainly have no compulsions about shame, and often, of law, when they make demands of people who work for them. A court has ruled that changing furloughed employees' out-of-office emails to blame Democrats for the government shutdown was a violation of their free speech rights, but that doesn't mean they'll be back at it again for whatever the next thing is they want to use the civil service as their mouthpieces for.
That continued lack of caring results in brownshirts invading day care facilities to kidnap a worker there, because lack of caring also means not caring about whether or not young children see the state's violence performed in front of them. And, of course, such an uncaring environment allows for other uncaring people to flourish, like the criminals who pose as the brownshirts and use the fact that the brownshirts refuse to identify themselves in meaningful ways to their advantage.
(That said, when someone protested the brownshirts by lobbing a sandwich at them, a grand jury refused to return an indictment, and the jury convened for the misdemeanor trial returned a not guilty verdict. So.)
Because they are ghouls, they don't think of the people who rely on programs like nutritional assistance as actual people, instead hosting a party themed on the last period of great excess, the 1920s, on the eve of the expiry of nutritional assistance benefits for millions. Then, when receiving pushback and federal court demands to fund the program, they maliciously complied, saying they'd only use enough funds to fund benefits at 50% of the allotments, which then produced more demands and court orders to properly fund the program. Which the majority of the Supreme Court immediately put on hold on, because they don't have to care that while this gets wrangled in the courts, of course, people go hungry, because SNAP is often an essential part of their food budget for the month.
Because they don't care about what the costs of being a non-rich person are, the administration has scuttled the Internal Revenue Service's Direct File program, which piloted last year as a free and online way for regular people to file their taxes electronically, using data the IRS already collects. Senator Wyden, general knowledgeable and level-headed about such things, lambasted the administration for choosing to favor tax preparation companies and software, rather than the robust and working Direct File program.
Because they don't care about the benefits of a society where the full diversity of people are allowed to flourish, the majority of the Supreme Court of the United States allowed the administration to constrain passports so that they have a "sex" marker that displays their sex at birth, instead of a gender identity or what someone's sex may be at that moment. (Which, of course, doesn't account for intersex or other people whose sex doesn't land squarely in a binary.) And the administration has said they will deny visa applications to people who don't meet an arbitrary standard of thinness, taking refuge in medical fatphobia and "worries" that fat people might be a drain on the U.S. healthcare system.
On the topic of diversity, did we mention lately that the vice-administrator repeatedly says that he wants his wife to convert to his religion, instead of having kept hers? But that he's apparently okay with her not-conversion so far. That might be because the kids are going to a religious school of his religion and being raised in his religion, and therefore he probably believes there's no chance that they might instead want to follow their mother's religious practices instead. (Boy, what a blow to his fragile masculinity that might be.) Of course, there's also the part where his embrace of the recently widowed wife of the Turning Point USA founded after his assassination seemed to be much less about comforting someone in their grief and more about something else, so if in the future, it turns out that the marriage isn't as stable, or he isn't as tolerant as he appeared, there will be at least one person pointing to this situation and saying "Told you." (Given that the administrator is very much a sex pest, and has been adjudicated as such, it probably wouldn't be that much more of a stretch to find out that the vice-administrator also has that particular vice, even if not to the pederastic tastes that the administrator's close association with Epstein might suggest.)
And because they've been effective at removing shame as something that affects them, even if they're still attuned to what other people's shame might mean in terms of political will, even as it becomes abundantly clear that the current administrator has always been a great friend of a known pederast and sex trafficker, even when he was in office before, the standard reaction to this information is deny, deny, deny, claim it's a hoax or a witch-hunt, and never ever accept reality.
They don't care about all the children who have already died to gun violence, and they don't care about the ones who will do so in the future.
They're also aided by media outlets more than ready to parrot their talking points about feminism and wash it into a veneer of respectability, and a viewpoint that strongly tries to replace any internal standards for self-worth or success with external ones that have neither upper nor lower bounds, so that we will keep engaging with the market, whether as buyer or seller, in a desperate hope to get our self-worth to where we want it to be.
The current administration has decided that they're not interested in allowing most refugees to the United States, in flagrant defiance of precedent and one of the bedrock ideals that most people believe about the U.S., and instead will focus on a small group of South Africans they think of as "refugees."
And, of course, while most Democrats held the line on making sure that health care costs wouldn't spike precipitously for the people who would have to bear them the most, 8 Senators who claim to be Democrats decided they didn't care, and voted with the Republicans to provide government funding again without any of the things that should have been guaranteed before any such bills were passed.
The people they're appealing to are the kind of people who engage in collective masturbation while trying to view as much pornographic content as possible, and specifically the kind of content telling them they're worthless and will only ever be a worthless person masturbating. I won't say there's a causal relationship, but I wouldn't be surprised if these are also the kind of men who have been receiving messages from day one that they will never achieve masculinity, but they must defend its most toxic form against all comers if they want a hope of a chance. (The writer complains that it seems more and more like "toxic" and "masculinity" are inexorably linked, and that drives people to be toxic, which should be treated with similar derision as "Well, you kept calling me a Nazi, which offends me, and so I will behave even more like a Nazi becuase you keep trying to shame me for doing it." They do get better, though, and land on the correct argument of "Hey, we need prominent alternatives to manosphere influencers that pretend to care to get you buying their products.") The kind of people who asked early on in their lives, and then later on in their lives, as well, why they keep getting rejected by women, and then not listening to the people in their lives telling them the answer to that question, repeatedly.
Surprising a fair number of people, The Supereme Court of the United States declined to hear a challenge asking them to review and re-decide their decision on Obergefell v. Hodges. Although this was initially presented as a more formal challenge, or perhaps as a new case that could throw out the older one, it seems the petition was much more limited in scope, and the justices are not likely to overturn a decision they already made. At least, not without significantly more change to the court, or someone giving them a better excuse to do it with. So, while this might not have been as hair-on-fire as it originally looked, it's certainly likely that given a better excuse, the Court would certainly seriously consider overturning Obergefell.
The full 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to the United States ruled that policies calling the intentional misgendering of transgender students bullying are not allowed, but schools are allowed to stop cis students from being bullied by intentional misgendering, because apparently misgendering a cis student is referring to their "physical characteristics", but misgendering a trans student is permitted because the harm of a cis student being punished for their "scientific or religious beliefs" outweighs the harm to the trans student for, y'know, being bullied.
The state of Texas' Attorney General is suing the current and previous makers of the drug named Tylenol, claiming deceptive practices and citing the nonexistent link between the drug and autism pulled out of thin air by the federal administrator as definitive proof of the truth of his accusation.
On other tiers of politics, New York City elected Zohran Mamdani as its mayor, because he ran on a platform that appealed to the not-rich residents of the City, and because his chief opponent was a disgraced former governor. I hope that he'll get the opportunity to enact his promises, and that we'll see New York City thrive from it. For now, though, all of his opponents seem to be running out the usual tropes - a Red Scare, Islamophobia, and the rest.
The voters of the state of California gave approval to have their congressional districts redrawn so as to blunt the influence of other states that are doing the same with the express purposes of creating a permanent Republican majority in the House of Representatives.
The voters of the state of Colorado passed two propositions to fund school meals for all Colorado public school students, a timely and important act to do in the middle of the federal dickery about nutrition assistance, but also, a humane thing to do and one that will likely reap some academic benefits.
The union behind ProPublica is demanding a fair contract for their workers. The Condé Nast union, who work for publications including Teen Vogue and WIRED, have been trying to undo the damage caused when the company consolidated Teen Vogue and then fired almost all of their non-white staff. The publisher has now filed a complaint against the union for what they claim are breaches of the bargaining agreement. (Which might very well have been something as innocuous as "asking them to not do the racist thing they're doing.")
It becomes very difficult for a young adult to build independence skills and experience when there are still adults in their life that are trying to manage that life. The pendulum has swung in the other direction, then, from an ethos that suggests that intervening only when absolutely necessary is the right way to raise children toward one that says stepping in early and often is the way to go. I'm sure we'll arrive at some synthesis eventually, where there's an agreement about which kinds of situations require an adult immediately and which ones are best left for children and young adults to fend for themselves over, but I don't think we're there yet.
exercising hunting dogs by having then chase cross-country runners until they catch them. Much better than the foxhunts that used to happen with them in times past.
In technology, remember that even your library lending apps, like Libby, might contain unwanted AI. A recommendation service is almost one of those things that machine learning could be good at, if it could consider and interpolate all the possible points of data and return good matches, and then fuzz those so that people get the occasional recommendation of something that they might be interested in, but might not discover on their own. That said, current models that machine recommendations use generally tend to suck. There's a lot to being able to find the right book for a human, and much of it is not currently quantifiable.
Jon Scalzi on how inaccurate the LLM slop fueled by the fascist's belief in his own mighty penis, err, coding skills, are, when it comes to a subject he has intimate knowledge of: himself.
Not that the obvious failures of the companies he's bought, and the LLM that he's trying to roll out as a general-purpose AI, has stopped the Tesla shareholders from giving him an executive compensation package worth $1 trillion USD, assuming he can meet the targets outlined in the package. The approval comes amidst threats from the CEO that he would leave the company if his extortion deal wasn't approved.
The United States military is being fleeced by contractors who write into their contracts that only they are allowed to repair the equipment they sell. If pushback can succeed for the people who are out killing others and projecting hegemony, maybe we can demand that the rest of us deserve the right to repair our own tech, too.
A specific company is acting as a copyright troll, claiming in lawsuits that specific people have downloaded adult content, but, as with other such things, the technology they use to determine who the person downloading supposedly uses, at best, guesswork. The company basically bets that nobody is going to want to take a suit to trial about the possibility of having downloaded adult content, and therefore usually settles with their targets, rather than anything else. Which is, to put it mildly, the kind of behavior that is supposed to be associated with the casting couch, rather than someone doing serious work trying to find infringement.
In similarly scummy behavior, GoFundMe created donation pages for more than a million nonprofits without asking their consent, so they could skim a "tip" for themselves from the donation that someone was making to the charity, as well as a transaction fee on top of the processing fees. Once someone called them on it from a news organization, the company issued an apology and did what they should have done in the first place - removed the generated pages that haven't been claimed by those nonprofits. For those that claimed them and want to delist them, though, GoFundMe still makes them complete a verification process to delist.
And, of course, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads just straight-up relied on the profits they made from selling ad space on their platforms to people they knew were running scams to fund their LLM development. That's billions of dollars for the company to knowingly allow scams to run on their platforms. The company, of course, claims that it removes those ads as it finds them, and that nobody actually wants them on the platform except for the scammers.
The current drive for computer components to build datacenters that can hold and run LLMs is causing the prices of memory to spike, in the same way that all the people trying to buy up high-end video cards to turn them into bitcoin miners spiked the prices of the video cards to unaffordable levels for anyone who wanted to do something simple like play a game.
Youtube doesn't want people to know about the various ways you can install Windows 11 that aren't the official Microsoft way. And, of course, when asked to provide a reason why, there was only boilerplate and the underlying assumption that computers were responsible and the humans had no agency to override them.
Someone managed to get on a Microsoft Teams call held by the company Cellebrite, who manufacture and offer tools to hack smartphones, and posted some of the information from the call. Supposedly, Cellebrite offers their tools to law enforcement, who often find themselves in the situation of confronting a locked device and not having obtained sufficient permission to search the devices, and would rather not bother with court requirements, or the stringent rules against self-incrimination. So.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has demanded information about the owner of the archive.is domain, likely to prosecute them for felony contempt of business model, since the archive.is snapshotting software is regularly used by visitors to the site to bypass the paywalls on various sites, since it accepts whatever URL is put into it without requiring any kind of verification that the person making the request is authorized to have the archive copy made. As usual, useful tools will be attacked and buried by those who profit from rent-seeking rather than from being better at capitalism.
Studies continue to suggest that the sounds of traffic and other loud activities common to all kinds of urbanized, car-centric areas are detrimental to our health.
A discovery of tape being cleaned out may have unearthed a complete copy of the fourth version of Bell Labs' UNIX, for which no complete copy is currently known to exist. If they can get the tape to work, and the tape is in sufficiently good condition, that might patch a hole in the understanding of the evolution of that operating system. Which is pretty cool, even if the value of it is in patching that hole, instead of some other thing.
Last out for tonight, an eyesore with a bad caricature and Randian-libertarian messaging is now providing a better message, since the land and the billboard were bought by the local Native nation.
And research now suggests that humans do instinctively work to help each other, rather than passively watch others be hurt, especially in emergency situations.
(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: 2025-11-19 03:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-19 10:20 pm (UTC)If this became an affair, Vance would walk away clean and Kirk's widow would shoulder all the blame.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-28 12:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-28 08:08 pm (UTC)