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silveradeptLet's begin with finally understanding how the Dresden Codex is able to calculate eclipses with exacting accuracy.
Alice Wong, ceaseless activist and person who wanted us to really look at not just the body, but the person behind it, and who often wanted us to know about things that weren't necessarily meant for "polite company" about it, has died. She knew it would happen eventually, but we were always hoping she'd pen a few more things for us to chew upon.
Having banned them completely outside of research studies for the under-18 crowd, the UK is announcing a large-scale clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers in the under-18 cohort. Presumably so they can have their own conclusions about how safe and effective they are, even if that kind of conclusion is unlikely to be tolerated by the ministers who want to use it as a further cudgel.
We must once again stress that all things that are natural are not necessarily good for you, and that people who want to charge you money to give you no information about how to safely have birth, and who will actively encourage you not to seek appropriate care and assistance in the case of complications or emergencies are not trustworthy nor should they receive any kind of money at all. Of course, they're not advertising themselves that way, so it can be harder to spot the fakery until you're in it, and since it also preys upon the vulnerable, it may not be something that you notice is fakery or a problem until something terrible and tragic happens.
Even if the way that can be named is not the eternal Way, being able to identify and label your emotional states can go a significant way toward regulating them.
A federal court dismissed the thin and shambling cases against James Comey and Letitia James because the person prosecuting the case was not lawfully appointed, and therefore lacked the standing to bring the cases.
The Department of Justice is ordered, by law, to release the files they have in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, known felon, child trafficker, and pederast, within thirty days of the signing of the bill by the administrator. There are exceptions in the bill for things like ongoing investigations, which may be used to ensure that some parts of the files don't get released because there's a sudden "investigation" with regard to them and any persons mentioned in them, so it's not a complete win to have everything out in the open, barring necessary redactions. (If you are wondering why the administrator would sign such a bill, it was passed through both of the houses of the legislature with one total nay vote, and therefore a veto would have likely been overridden swiftly.)
The kidnapping squads are turning to applications fueled by data from the Motorola Solutions and Thomson Reuters companies to track vehicles wherever they may go, using license plate scans and data enriched by Thomson Reuters. It's very clear the kidnapping squads are buying data collected from data brokers to track us, in exactly the same way the ad companies want to, but with far more sinister intentions. Almost like we need a much better data privacy law and policy.
In what looks awfully a lot like self-dealing, a company run by the husband of the chief spokesperson of the Department of Homeland Security received at least some part of a more than $200 million USD contract from said Department to develop advertising to intimidate would-be immigrants. This would normally require a competitive bid process, but the process was skipped because an "emergency" was declared. And, to make things shadier, the company that received the money first had it washed through a Delaware corporation.
The Intercept is keeping track of what we know about the boat strikes the United States is unilaterally carrying out in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the number of people killed. These are people that the administrator resolutely claims the extrajudicial ability to execute by designating them as drug smugglers and terrorists. And since the people attacked are dead, they can't exactly contest his claims in court.
After several Democrats reminded members of the armed forces that they have a duty and obligation to not execute illegal orders, the administrator took to his social media platform to decry them and claim that such a reminder is tantamount to treason against the country, with customary strong rhetoric and boosting the opinions of others advocating for violent ends to the Democrats.
The National Park Service has been ordered to charge persons who cannot prove their residency in the United States vastly higher prices to enter or visit the National Parks. Which is in line with this administration making foolish moves that will rebound on them with a vengeance, but that they believe will be vindicated by their supporters.
And to report on all of this and provide the documentation and information needed to corroborate them, the administration is trying to remove any protections that an employee would have for going through the whistleblower process. Because they don't like leaks and want everyone to be quiet about what they're doing. There are laws in his way, of course, but this administration regularly shows contempt for law.
Because they decided to stop being just the Boy Scouts and instead accept Scouts of more than one gender, the Secretary of Defense plans on scuttling the cooperation and logistical support Scouting has had from them for holding their national Jamboree. Scouting is too woke for this administration, who definitely are more interested in keeping all the men-only spaces they can, so that they can push back against the idea that they might have to respect women and permit them to participate in civic and organizational life, instead of being banished to the kitchen, the marriage bed, and the birthing ward.
There is a bright spot, however: the wrecking ball that went after the civil service under the excuse of efficiency has been officially dissolved. The damage they've done has already been done and has reverberated and will not likely be reversed, so there's no need to keep them around to attract hostility. Plus, their continued damage has been normalized within the processes of the administration.
By rolling out a feature to give the location of accounts on Musk's Folly, the platform revealed that many of the most popular accounts with the people who proudly identify with the administrator's cult of personality and destruction are not based in the country they're trying to influence, but in other nations entirely. Which certainly provides validation to the belief that a lot of social media accounts that are influencers of opinion of the far right are foreign psychological operations, or at least farmed out to foreign countries to do the actual postings.
Since the state of Texas openly admitted they were attempting to redraw their Congressional district boundaries for forbidden purposes, they were enjoined from redrawing their Congressional district boundaries. This appeal will go to the Supremes and they will have to rule on it.
The bishops of the Catholic Church of the United States proved they were, indeed, Catholic, and said that no gender-affirming care would be found at Catholic hospitals. As the article notes, sometimes Catholic hospitals are the only ones in the community, so that will probably have to be wrangled with the appropriate civic authorities to see just how much they can enforce that decree on someone seeking care from them who doesn't have other options.
In technology, An election of an organization dedicated to cryptography and the study thereof had to nullify an election because one of the three parts needed to fully decrypt the results and tabulate them was irretrievably lost through human error. The election is being re-run, but this time with needing two of the three components to unlock the tabulation, instead of all three, and the person who lost their portion of the key has resigned from their trustee position. Encryption works wonderfully, but by the very nature of it, if you lose the thing that you need to decrypt it, and the encryption itself is sufficiently strong, you're hosed.
An accident at a Soyuz rocket launch pad is bringing the question of whether there is enough will and resource to do the repairs and to keep the International Space Station up, running, and regularly supplied. With the land war in Ukraine currently eating up significant resources, it remains to be seen whether the Russian Federation will continue to make their commitments to the International Space Station.
An LLM-powered childrens' toy got the hook after it started talking about very not child-friendly topics in interactions with actual children. No doubt the engineers are shocked to find that the guardrails they put around their bot didn't actually stop it from performing the task it was programmed to do. I wonder if they're the same engineers finding out just how popular it is for people to talk dirty to a chatbot and have an image manipulator replace the heads of adult film stars or others with the heads of the people the the purveyors of the chatbot want to roleplay with. So every photo, potentially, could be turned into a sexual image, without any permission sought or obtained for this use, so that someone else can get off to their fantasies involving the person in the photograph. Rule 34 is not just a quippable internet maxim, but in fact a statement of bedrock truth about how people relate to each other, and not all of that relationship is necessarily good or consensual.
Once again, the government of the United States is attempting to pass bills that would make demands of online platforms to ensure that adults have to give up sensitive information to access permitted content, in the name of protecting children from that content. It also includes outright bans from great swathes of the Internet for those who are under specific ages.
The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a case where media corporations are demanding that Internet Service Providers implement very strict rules involving cutting off Internet access entirely to an entire household if they can substantiate at least one instance of copyright violation against them. The defendants in the case have not made their defense easy, by expressing sufficiently on the record contempt for the copyright law. The media companies will argue that Cox facilitated the copyright infringement by not even temporarily suspending accounts that have multiple instances of privacy alleged against them. The more that I read about how these companies supposedly "prove" that someone is infringing, by using IP address and often by joining and seeding their own copyrighted material as honeypots, the more I wish for a court system that didn't defer to large corporations simply because they are large and litigious.
Solar activity may have been the catalyst for Airbus recalls and software updates, to ensure that systems don't cause sudden losses of height while the plane is flying.
Microsoft, current owner of Activision and the IP related to Zork, has decided to release the source code for Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III under the MIT License. Delve into the repositories, but always remember to keep a light lit, lest you be eaten by a grue.
Qualcomm seems to be already making questionable choices with the Arduino platform, making the hobbyists who liked Arduino for its openness of software and hardware strongly suspicious that Arduino will not stay open for much longer.
A judge chose to side with the parent company of Facebook against the Federal Trade Commission's claims that it held a monopoly on social networking apps, deciding that instead, social networks are dead and now we're in social media, and therefore the competition is from all the video apps, and the chat apps, and all the other such things. The pivot to video that isn't real is apparently real enough for the judge to side against the government.
Some of the press writing team at the Science series of journals did an experiment with an LLM, and found that while it could transcribe a study reasonably well, it could not translate that study into a form that would be more easily digestible by a non-scientist audience, and, in addition to the possibility of catastrophic error, that translation fault is something that makes the LLMs unsuitable for the work that they do. It's a very nice experiment.
A probabilistic predictive model is very, very bad at composing something that requires precision, or why most LLM-created knitting or crocheting patterns won't work. Unfortunately, the people who publish such things will take the money and run before someone finds out that the pattern is unworkable, and generated by something like Hat3000, the successor to SkyKnit.
Your bosses are probably drawing from the same set of talking points and influencer posts as they claim that you need to adopt the stochastic parrots and use them in your workflow - play bingo with them. And remember that the infrastructure to support these tools is accelerating climate disasters and disproportionately affecting historically disenfranchised and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Rare and out-of-copyright recordings of music will be going online for everyone to hear, thanks to a preservation project that has made digital recordings of records pressed and sold in an era where their companies did not keep masters or backups of the material they sold. But the record collectors have them, and they've been keeping them preserved for all.
Last out, the right to say no, and how the increased automation of things that need a human touch continues to erode that right, not the people directing the greater automation necessarily believe that the people they're automating were human in the first place, and the way that tools become integrated into the human experience, and how accepting things like the stochastic parrots in their current form only benefits the people who want to continue the dehumanization process.
And, of course, the Dreamwidth December points sale is on! Support the site with paid services, get 10% of your order in points that you can use to make a later purchase cheaper or free. And if you already have paid services and want Dreamwidth to continue as the best LJ fork created, and to also routinely assist in punching governments in the nose when they try to impose poorly-thought-out laws and rules under the guise of protecting children from adults, consider wither turning communities into paid accounts, adding icon slots, or playing Paid Account Fairy and using the function that allows you to gift paid time to a specific person or to a random active user of the site.
(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.)
Alice Wong, ceaseless activist and person who wanted us to really look at not just the body, but the person behind it, and who often wanted us to know about things that weren't necessarily meant for "polite company" about it, has died. She knew it would happen eventually, but we were always hoping she'd pen a few more things for us to chew upon.
Having banned them completely outside of research studies for the under-18 crowd, the UK is announcing a large-scale clinical trial on the use of puberty blockers in the under-18 cohort. Presumably so they can have their own conclusions about how safe and effective they are, even if that kind of conclusion is unlikely to be tolerated by the ministers who want to use it as a further cudgel.
We must once again stress that all things that are natural are not necessarily good for you, and that people who want to charge you money to give you no information about how to safely have birth, and who will actively encourage you not to seek appropriate care and assistance in the case of complications or emergencies are not trustworthy nor should they receive any kind of money at all. Of course, they're not advertising themselves that way, so it can be harder to spot the fakery until you're in it, and since it also preys upon the vulnerable, it may not be something that you notice is fakery or a problem until something terrible and tragic happens.
Even if the way that can be named is not the eternal Way, being able to identify and label your emotional states can go a significant way toward regulating them.
A federal court dismissed the thin and shambling cases against James Comey and Letitia James because the person prosecuting the case was not lawfully appointed, and therefore lacked the standing to bring the cases.
The Department of Justice is ordered, by law, to release the files they have in relation to Jeffrey Epstein, known felon, child trafficker, and pederast, within thirty days of the signing of the bill by the administrator. There are exceptions in the bill for things like ongoing investigations, which may be used to ensure that some parts of the files don't get released because there's a sudden "investigation" with regard to them and any persons mentioned in them, so it's not a complete win to have everything out in the open, barring necessary redactions. (If you are wondering why the administrator would sign such a bill, it was passed through both of the houses of the legislature with one total nay vote, and therefore a veto would have likely been overridden swiftly.)
The kidnapping squads are turning to applications fueled by data from the Motorola Solutions and Thomson Reuters companies to track vehicles wherever they may go, using license plate scans and data enriched by Thomson Reuters. It's very clear the kidnapping squads are buying data collected from data brokers to track us, in exactly the same way the ad companies want to, but with far more sinister intentions. Almost like we need a much better data privacy law and policy.
In what looks awfully a lot like self-dealing, a company run by the husband of the chief spokesperson of the Department of Homeland Security received at least some part of a more than $200 million USD contract from said Department to develop advertising to intimidate would-be immigrants. This would normally require a competitive bid process, but the process was skipped because an "emergency" was declared. And, to make things shadier, the company that received the money first had it washed through a Delaware corporation.
The Intercept is keeping track of what we know about the boat strikes the United States is unilaterally carrying out in the Caribbean and Pacific, including the number of people killed. These are people that the administrator resolutely claims the extrajudicial ability to execute by designating them as drug smugglers and terrorists. And since the people attacked are dead, they can't exactly contest his claims in court.
After several Democrats reminded members of the armed forces that they have a duty and obligation to not execute illegal orders, the administrator took to his social media platform to decry them and claim that such a reminder is tantamount to treason against the country, with customary strong rhetoric and boosting the opinions of others advocating for violent ends to the Democrats.
The National Park Service has been ordered to charge persons who cannot prove their residency in the United States vastly higher prices to enter or visit the National Parks. Which is in line with this administration making foolish moves that will rebound on them with a vengeance, but that they believe will be vindicated by their supporters.
And to report on all of this and provide the documentation and information needed to corroborate them, the administration is trying to remove any protections that an employee would have for going through the whistleblower process. Because they don't like leaks and want everyone to be quiet about what they're doing. There are laws in his way, of course, but this administration regularly shows contempt for law.
Because they decided to stop being just the Boy Scouts and instead accept Scouts of more than one gender, the Secretary of Defense plans on scuttling the cooperation and logistical support Scouting has had from them for holding their national Jamboree. Scouting is too woke for this administration, who definitely are more interested in keeping all the men-only spaces they can, so that they can push back against the idea that they might have to respect women and permit them to participate in civic and organizational life, instead of being banished to the kitchen, the marriage bed, and the birthing ward.
There is a bright spot, however: the wrecking ball that went after the civil service under the excuse of efficiency has been officially dissolved. The damage they've done has already been done and has reverberated and will not likely be reversed, so there's no need to keep them around to attract hostility. Plus, their continued damage has been normalized within the processes of the administration.
By rolling out a feature to give the location of accounts on Musk's Folly, the platform revealed that many of the most popular accounts with the people who proudly identify with the administrator's cult of personality and destruction are not based in the country they're trying to influence, but in other nations entirely. Which certainly provides validation to the belief that a lot of social media accounts that are influencers of opinion of the far right are foreign psychological operations, or at least farmed out to foreign countries to do the actual postings.
Since the state of Texas openly admitted they were attempting to redraw their Congressional district boundaries for forbidden purposes, they were enjoined from redrawing their Congressional district boundaries. This appeal will go to the Supremes and they will have to rule on it.
The bishops of the Catholic Church of the United States proved they were, indeed, Catholic, and said that no gender-affirming care would be found at Catholic hospitals. As the article notes, sometimes Catholic hospitals are the only ones in the community, so that will probably have to be wrangled with the appropriate civic authorities to see just how much they can enforce that decree on someone seeking care from them who doesn't have other options.
In technology, An election of an organization dedicated to cryptography and the study thereof had to nullify an election because one of the three parts needed to fully decrypt the results and tabulate them was irretrievably lost through human error. The election is being re-run, but this time with needing two of the three components to unlock the tabulation, instead of all three, and the person who lost their portion of the key has resigned from their trustee position. Encryption works wonderfully, but by the very nature of it, if you lose the thing that you need to decrypt it, and the encryption itself is sufficiently strong, you're hosed.
An accident at a Soyuz rocket launch pad is bringing the question of whether there is enough will and resource to do the repairs and to keep the International Space Station up, running, and regularly supplied. With the land war in Ukraine currently eating up significant resources, it remains to be seen whether the Russian Federation will continue to make their commitments to the International Space Station.
An LLM-powered childrens' toy got the hook after it started talking about very not child-friendly topics in interactions with actual children. No doubt the engineers are shocked to find that the guardrails they put around their bot didn't actually stop it from performing the task it was programmed to do. I wonder if they're the same engineers finding out just how popular it is for people to talk dirty to a chatbot and have an image manipulator replace the heads of adult film stars or others with the heads of the people the the purveyors of the chatbot want to roleplay with. So every photo, potentially, could be turned into a sexual image, without any permission sought or obtained for this use, so that someone else can get off to their fantasies involving the person in the photograph. Rule 34 is not just a quippable internet maxim, but in fact a statement of bedrock truth about how people relate to each other, and not all of that relationship is necessarily good or consensual.
Once again, the government of the United States is attempting to pass bills that would make demands of online platforms to ensure that adults have to give up sensitive information to access permitted content, in the name of protecting children from that content. It also includes outright bans from great swathes of the Internet for those who are under specific ages.
The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a case where media corporations are demanding that Internet Service Providers implement very strict rules involving cutting off Internet access entirely to an entire household if they can substantiate at least one instance of copyright violation against them. The defendants in the case have not made their defense easy, by expressing sufficiently on the record contempt for the copyright law. The media companies will argue that Cox facilitated the copyright infringement by not even temporarily suspending accounts that have multiple instances of privacy alleged against them. The more that I read about how these companies supposedly "prove" that someone is infringing, by using IP address and often by joining and seeding their own copyrighted material as honeypots, the more I wish for a court system that didn't defer to large corporations simply because they are large and litigious.
Solar activity may have been the catalyst for Airbus recalls and software updates, to ensure that systems don't cause sudden losses of height while the plane is flying.
Microsoft, current owner of Activision and the IP related to Zork, has decided to release the source code for Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III under the MIT License. Delve into the repositories, but always remember to keep a light lit, lest you be eaten by a grue.
Qualcomm seems to be already making questionable choices with the Arduino platform, making the hobbyists who liked Arduino for its openness of software and hardware strongly suspicious that Arduino will not stay open for much longer.
A judge chose to side with the parent company of Facebook against the Federal Trade Commission's claims that it held a monopoly on social networking apps, deciding that instead, social networks are dead and now we're in social media, and therefore the competition is from all the video apps, and the chat apps, and all the other such things. The pivot to video that isn't real is apparently real enough for the judge to side against the government.
Some of the press writing team at the Science series of journals did an experiment with an LLM, and found that while it could transcribe a study reasonably well, it could not translate that study into a form that would be more easily digestible by a non-scientist audience, and, in addition to the possibility of catastrophic error, that translation fault is something that makes the LLMs unsuitable for the work that they do. It's a very nice experiment.
A probabilistic predictive model is very, very bad at composing something that requires precision, or why most LLM-created knitting or crocheting patterns won't work. Unfortunately, the people who publish such things will take the money and run before someone finds out that the pattern is unworkable, and generated by something like Hat3000, the successor to SkyKnit.
Your bosses are probably drawing from the same set of talking points and influencer posts as they claim that you need to adopt the stochastic parrots and use them in your workflow - play bingo with them. And remember that the infrastructure to support these tools is accelerating climate disasters and disproportionately affecting historically disenfranchised and disadvantaged neighborhoods.
Rare and out-of-copyright recordings of music will be going online for everyone to hear, thanks to a preservation project that has made digital recordings of records pressed and sold in an era where their companies did not keep masters or backups of the material they sold. But the record collectors have them, and they've been keeping them preserved for all.
Last out, the right to say no, and how the increased automation of things that need a human touch continues to erode that right, not the people directing the greater automation necessarily believe that the people they're automating were human in the first place, and the way that tools become integrated into the human experience, and how accepting things like the stochastic parrots in their current form only benefits the people who want to continue the dehumanization process.
And, of course, the Dreamwidth December points sale is on! Support the site with paid services, get 10% of your order in points that you can use to make a later purchase cheaper or free. And if you already have paid services and want Dreamwidth to continue as the best LJ fork created, and to also routinely assist in punching governments in the nose when they try to impose poorly-thought-out laws and rules under the guise of protecting children from adults, consider wither turning communities into paid accounts, adding icon slots, or playing Paid Account Fairy and using the function that allows you to gift paid time to a specific person or to a random active user of the site.
(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: 2025-12-03 04:18 pm (UTC)The only thing I disagree with is "FBS is not, by any conventional definition, a cult (...)"
no subject
Date: 2025-12-04 09:53 pm (UTC)