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silveradeptLet's begin with the understanding that your librarians are dealing with additional stresses than they had been in the past, and that the stresses they have been forced to deal with in the past are increased in velocity, size, and intensity. Beyond that, the current administration, after trying to zero out the funding available through the Institute of Museum and Library Services, has explicitly made it so that IMLS will give preferential treatment to grant applications that are in line with the administration's political ideology, which is about as anti-library as he can get. (Unless, of course, your library is more in line with the traditional duties and ideologies that it had, employing white women as saviors to blacks, browns, and poors to teach them how to act properly white and give proper deference to whiteness.)
Now updated for 2026, Hazel Newlevant's SARS-CoV-2 zine.
Also, if you've used or updated your Notepad++ program within the last few months, you really want to reinstall it from scratch and check for signs of compromise, because apparently some state actors hacked the hosting provider for the program and inserted malicious code into it. So that will be fun for everyone who uses that program.
Under-rated ways of changing the world, which doesn't always mean they're easy, but that many of them are effective, and the kind of thing where you end up celebrating Petrov Day because you managed to correctly recognize a system was malfunctioning, rather than that the United States had decided to destroy the world. (#6 has a certain amount of appeal to me, as someone who doesn't work in a nondescript government office, but who has that kind of pathway available to themselves to make change in the world through boring, unflashy interactions with others.)
Every Olympic organizer has to deal with the fact that they are getting a lot of young people who are at the peak of their physical fitness and putting them all together in close quarters, and they try to plan accordingly to have enough prophylactics on hand. Milan-Cortina's suppy lasted three days.
A media frenzy about a gender-affirming care clinic in the UK and supposed complaints was a frenzy with no basis in reality, according to the number of actual complaints received, their subjects, and whether or not the entity claiming they had thousands on their side has actually pursued any of those claims. To say those things aloud, however, would have meant drawing the ire of those who most insistently wanted TERF Island to be a reality. Your preiodic reminder that the 'trans panic' is manufactured, much like other moral panics, by a tiny minority of people who have outsized influence over media and messaging, and who have ulterior motives as they try to make people afraid of others.
The International Olympic Committee chose to side with the oppressor by insisting that a Ukranian skeleton racer could not wear a helmet with the pictures of those dead from the Russian invasion of the country, claiming it was forbidden politics for the images to be on the helmet. Rather telling are the statements about how if the IOC insisted on taking sides in conflicts, there wouldn't be all that many NOCs allowed to compete in the Games. Which should a lightbulb moment, especially about attempting to at least enforce the Olympic Truce, as it were, but the organization does not understand what it says.
The relationship between fanworks and commercial works continues to get further muddied, as commercial publishers are looking for good fanfiction to adapt into original fic and to find good writers they can recruit into creating original commercial fic for them, and some fic writers are looking to use fic as their springboard into commercially-published original fiction. That's the thread of this article, which flirts with but never actually picks up the second thread that it teases - the way in which fanfiction and the conditions of fanfiction's creation reveal a lot about what published commercial fiction is still not willing to acknowledge and provide, outside of some very specific genre corridors and imprints, and that they continue to insist that fanfiction not be a large part of someone's openly-admitted-to writing background.
Three of the creators of the Alternity project (a multi-year collaborative game played out in the Wizarding World of someone who has long since tarnished her name such that it should never be spoken again) are in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and they are living what they once wrote about. They have things to tell us about their experiences, both in the game and in the real world.
One of the architects of terror in Minnesota has been demoted, but the terror campaigns continue. So it's a symbolic gesture at best. What will get something closer to justice is making sure those who have murdered are identified, and then prosecuted, for their murders.
Because they're still arresting journalists for doing their jobs of covering stories, claiming that those journalists are participating in intimidation or other such activities.
They're still firing chemical weapons at crowds engaged in peaceful assembly, resulting in chemical weapons being used on children. The crowd assembled in protests showed more discipline and restraint than those who were firing weapons into the crowd with the intent of exposing as many people as possible to the gasses.
They're still being suggested to have their duties expanded to poll intimidation agents as well as kidnappers and murderers.
The folks at 404 Media have put together and released a zine about the surveillance techniques and technologies deployed by the kidnappers and murderers so they can find and track their targets.
A police chief in St. Peter, Minnesota, managed to prevent the kidnapping squads from achieving their ends, releasing someone who should not have been subjected to the kidnapping squads from custody. The department denies they've done it, for the obvious reason of being seen to actually do things that serve their people, instead of the kidnappers, would bring punishment to them from those same kidnappers and the people in charge of them. The Seattle Police, for example, have refused to follow the lawful orders of their civilian oversight directing them not to cooperate with kidnappers and murderers, to document kidnapping and murdering in case of future prosecution, and to prevent kidnappers and murderers from using city property to stage and execute their kidnappings and murders.
A five year-old child kidnapped by the kidnapping squads has been returned home to his father, following a judge's order that they do so. This was the child who had been seized and then used as bait to try and get others to come out of the house where they could be kidnapped. The judge's ruling is short, brutal, and references significant portions of the United States Constitution that the kidnapping and murder squads have proclaimed they do not need to follow.
When the kidnappers and murderers do release persons from their facilities, they often do so without providing any means for those people to stay warm enough to get back to their homes and/or the possessions that were left behind when they were seized. There are volunteers filling this gap, providing warmth and coats for those who need them. So much so that they've asked people to stop giving them coats, after the outpouring was so swift and voluminous.
Extrajudicial methods are increasingly popular for a host of reasons, but one of lesser one is how much the Department responsible for prosecution sucks at their jobs, a very different suckitude than everyone previous.
While there isn't any historical precedent for the current regime's most fascist slogan yet, the fact that they're pulling slogans from places that sound very fascist means it's a fascist slogan now.
And in return, they get some slogans of their own. An Olympic skier with apparently exquisite penile penmanship pissed a protest in the snow against the kidnapping and murder squads at the Olympic Games.
Because they are petty, this administration has decided they will stop flying the rainbow flag at the national monument to the Stonewall Riots. The people responsible for doing the deed said they were simply following the updated flag guidance that has been in place for a while, but of course, this administration has been hard at work trying to make sure they erase all the people who aren't straight, white, Christian men.
The correct answer to the presence of a monopoly is to burn it to the ground, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez is more than ready to throw both accelerant and the ignition on such monopolies in health "care".
A corrupt official in the Justice Department holding more than $150,000 USD of investments in cryptocurrency killed investigations into cryptocurrency and the largely scammy, unregulated environment it operates in. And several other persons in the administration are very friendly with crypto and otherwise against requirements that government officials should abide by ethics and not have conflicts of interest in the pursuit of their jobs.
To help inflate the ego of the current administrator, and provide some grift as well, military servicepeople are potentially being pressured by their commanders to see the movie about the current administrator's current wife.
Because of the absolute muppets in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and their complete belief that modern medicine is either ineffective or actively harmful, actual harmful pathogens, like measles, are making a resurgence and threatening to revoke the status of elimination in the United States. And also, the insistence on products unsafe for consumption as somehow more healthy and appropriate leads to preventable deaths of infants. While they also refuse authorizations and applications for technologies that could prove useful against some of our most vexing pathogens, because the person in charge of Health and Human Services believes in conspiracy theories about gene rewriting through vaccination.
The chatbot deployed to champion the Health and Human Services' vision of healthy people had no trouble recommending people foods based on whether they could be inserted into the rectum easily. It does, however, seem to have at least suggested preparing the foods in ways so that they will not get lost into the rectum once inserted? So, score another one for chatbots deployed despite their clear vulnerabilities and limitations.
The administration's head of cyber security uploaded sensitive documents to a public-facing instance of ChatGPT. Because these are the kind of people who believe they have to use certain things to make certain people happy, or because they think they're going to be useful tools when it's been proven they're anything but.
Because these people suck so much at their jobs, they're trying to force the oligopolies that collect unnecessary amounts of data on you and your social posts to give them that data so they can harrass their critics and the people that report on the movements of the kidnapping and murder squads.
The administration has decided, once again, that reality doesn't work with their worldview, and rescinded a finding that said greenhouse gases were dangerous and needed to be regulated. No doubt on the insistence of all the people who don't like having their profits curtailed by such bothersome things as health and safety requirements. (And because it came into existence during the Obama presidency, and we already know what this administrator's opinion of the Obamas is.)
All in all, when the vice-administrator compared the situation of the United States to the Titanic, he was spot-on, including the fact that the current administration intends to drive straight into the iceberg and sink the ship, mostly because they feel there are "undeserving" people in steerage that they're willing to condemn all the first-class passengers for.
All of this was predictable, and laid out in the Project 2025 document, and yet, the media organizations that needed to stick their heads out the window and see if it was raining instead chose the safety and comfort of printing "both sides" so that they wouldn't end up being targeted (more than they already were), and even that gambit failed them. It was all there, but they chose to believe the denial of an avowed and inveterate liar carried more weight than the document itself and the evidence that strongly suggested this was a playbook for him to use. And now they are performing a surprised Pikachu, because their livelihoods demanded they not understand something, and it's coming to pass, just like they were told it would by people who knew what they were talking about and not lying to them.
The incoming mayor of New York City operates on a simple and fundamental principle: what happens if government works, and always works? If he can manage that with himself and his administration, then he paves the way for the loftier goals he has for improving the lives of those in the city. But if he can even just establish a baseline where government services work and are responsive to the needs of the residents, he'll have already greatly improved their lives.
In technology, China has banned having hidden door handles for electric vehicles, taking place 1 January 2007, without there also being mechanical releases for doors both outside and inside the vehicle. Presumably, also easily visible ones that you can find and use in a crisis situation.
Solid-state drives are subject to corruption if they are left without power for too long, but too long is years on end, so you don't want to try and use the "non-volatile" memory for long-term storage. Har, har, har.
Adobe intended to discontinue the Animate product, which most of us know better as Macromedia Flash, but user and subscriber outcry reversed the decision. Possibly because Adobe was hoping to make more money faster by shoveling "AI" features and other such things into their products, instead of supporting reliable software that provides them with sensible and steady income.
Having been bullied into giving control to a U.S. company, the new TikTok Terms and Conditions are worse and terrible than the prvious not great Terms and Conditions were.
The Discord platform is assuming that you're a teenager, unless your have managed to convince it you're an adult, or you provide it with a face scan or a government identification to prove otherwise. Which is drawing extremely large amounts of flak from the userbase, and is almost certainly being done because of the wave of moral panic and associated legislation that is demanding that platforms monitor the age of the people on their platforms and then prevent certain kinds of interaction, or set a maximum limit on time spent on the platform, or any number of significantly absurd things, in the service of keeping teens safe from preying adults and terrible algorithms and other such things that the onus would really be on the platform creators to provide appropriate tools for or to employ enough moderators to scrub out, rather than age verification measures or similar. Since the initial forms of verification have found to be ineffective against determined privacy advocates, some users may find their personal data being stored on servers associated with Peter Thiel. Which will only make them more mad, and also, creates another potential identification breach point.
After realizing how they would be pilloried for going through with it, Ring decided they didn't want a partnership with Flock after all. They're still both companies that are feeding data to kidnappers and murderers without requiring them to go through the correct processes of obtaining court orders for that data.
There's a somewhat profitable enterprise for men to film women while they're out on the town or going to and from various clubs, trying to take advantage of being innocuous and the public setting to capture more intimate or more sexualized angles of people who aren't trying to do any such thing, and who definitely didn't consent to being sexualized in such a way. Reminds me of the commentary of someone who was riding a subway and was pointing out to their companion about all the various technological and less-technological means that some of the creepier riders were using to try and get a peek up the skirts of other riders on the train.
Because people who sell software used to compromise the security of other people's phones and upload their information to someone who wants to spy on them aren't necessarily interested in their own security, someone hacked their servers and obtained the payment records and associated e-mail addresses for those who are slimy enough to have paid for stalkerware.
So it started with an LLM trying to get changes merged into a codebase. Those changes were rejected. So the LLM then generated and posted a hit piece on the person that rejected its contributions. And now we find that Ars Technical published, and then retracted, an article about the hit piece that used LLM-generated quotes without attribution. The person responsible has apologized and said that they were sick and rushing and accidentally used an LLM-generated summary of the blog post in response to the hit piece, instead of proper quotation. Of course, one wonders exactly why any journalist of any salt is using an LLM in any capacity related to their work.
Attempting to control all aspects of your life toward a theoretical maximization of longevity instead turns into a maximization of misery.
The Association for Computing Machinery has turned their digital library into an open-access resource, providing their papers and other materials for free and making it more likely those artifacts will be used and cited in other pieces of research or practical applications.
The Central Intelligence Agency's most nonpartisan and useful resource, the World Factbook, is no longer being updated. Which is a shame, because that was one of the few useful unclassified things to come out of the CIA, and invaluable to a generation of researchers who were doing their country reports and needed something more than the barebones entity that an encyclopedia entry might provide for some of the lesser-known countries of the world.
Last out for tonight, The ways that the mountie falls off the pedestal, and the way that everyone tries to be a bit more like the mountie in due South, which makes the characters and the show better all the time.
The passive-aggressive technique of triangulation, where a person uses a third party to express their difficulties with, or to engage in bullying of, another person. Which I have apparently been victimized by, and only found out after the person who was doing it had left the organization. Which I still have massive issues with, because I prefer direct feedback rather than indirect feedback as both as a "I can't fix what I don't know about" issue, but also because people complaining about me instead of to me was also things that the manager who wanted to fire me took into account. Without telling me there were problems.
And a laugh: Accusations of penis enlargement to provide more lift for ski-jumping costuming in the 2026 Olympics. Yes, we have gotten to the point where penis size matters. Clearly, the condom suppliers didn't get the memo.
(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.)
Now updated for 2026, Hazel Newlevant's SARS-CoV-2 zine.
Also, if you've used or updated your Notepad++ program within the last few months, you really want to reinstall it from scratch and check for signs of compromise, because apparently some state actors hacked the hosting provider for the program and inserted malicious code into it. So that will be fun for everyone who uses that program.
Under-rated ways of changing the world, which doesn't always mean they're easy, but that many of them are effective, and the kind of thing where you end up celebrating Petrov Day because you managed to correctly recognize a system was malfunctioning, rather than that the United States had decided to destroy the world. (#6 has a certain amount of appeal to me, as someone who doesn't work in a nondescript government office, but who has that kind of pathway available to themselves to make change in the world through boring, unflashy interactions with others.)
Every Olympic organizer has to deal with the fact that they are getting a lot of young people who are at the peak of their physical fitness and putting them all together in close quarters, and they try to plan accordingly to have enough prophylactics on hand. Milan-Cortina's suppy lasted three days.
A media frenzy about a gender-affirming care clinic in the UK and supposed complaints was a frenzy with no basis in reality, according to the number of actual complaints received, their subjects, and whether or not the entity claiming they had thousands on their side has actually pursued any of those claims. To say those things aloud, however, would have meant drawing the ire of those who most insistently wanted TERF Island to be a reality. Your preiodic reminder that the 'trans panic' is manufactured, much like other moral panics, by a tiny minority of people who have outsized influence over media and messaging, and who have ulterior motives as they try to make people afraid of others.
The International Olympic Committee chose to side with the oppressor by insisting that a Ukranian skeleton racer could not wear a helmet with the pictures of those dead from the Russian invasion of the country, claiming it was forbidden politics for the images to be on the helmet. Rather telling are the statements about how if the IOC insisted on taking sides in conflicts, there wouldn't be all that many NOCs allowed to compete in the Games. Which should a lightbulb moment, especially about attempting to at least enforce the Olympic Truce, as it were, but the organization does not understand what it says.
The relationship between fanworks and commercial works continues to get further muddied, as commercial publishers are looking for good fanfiction to adapt into original fic and to find good writers they can recruit into creating original commercial fic for them, and some fic writers are looking to use fic as their springboard into commercially-published original fiction. That's the thread of this article, which flirts with but never actually picks up the second thread that it teases - the way in which fanfiction and the conditions of fanfiction's creation reveal a lot about what published commercial fiction is still not willing to acknowledge and provide, outside of some very specific genre corridors and imprints, and that they continue to insist that fanfiction not be a large part of someone's openly-admitted-to writing background.
Three of the creators of the Alternity project (a multi-year collaborative game played out in the Wizarding World of someone who has long since tarnished her name such that it should never be spoken again) are in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and they are living what they once wrote about. They have things to tell us about their experiences, both in the game and in the real world.
One of the architects of terror in Minnesota has been demoted, but the terror campaigns continue. So it's a symbolic gesture at best. What will get something closer to justice is making sure those who have murdered are identified, and then prosecuted, for their murders.
Because they're still arresting journalists for doing their jobs of covering stories, claiming that those journalists are participating in intimidation or other such activities.
They're still firing chemical weapons at crowds engaged in peaceful assembly, resulting in chemical weapons being used on children. The crowd assembled in protests showed more discipline and restraint than those who were firing weapons into the crowd with the intent of exposing as many people as possible to the gasses.
They're still being suggested to have their duties expanded to poll intimidation agents as well as kidnappers and murderers.
The folks at 404 Media have put together and released a zine about the surveillance techniques and technologies deployed by the kidnappers and murderers so they can find and track their targets.
A police chief in St. Peter, Minnesota, managed to prevent the kidnapping squads from achieving their ends, releasing someone who should not have been subjected to the kidnapping squads from custody. The department denies they've done it, for the obvious reason of being seen to actually do things that serve their people, instead of the kidnappers, would bring punishment to them from those same kidnappers and the people in charge of them. The Seattle Police, for example, have refused to follow the lawful orders of their civilian oversight directing them not to cooperate with kidnappers and murderers, to document kidnapping and murdering in case of future prosecution, and to prevent kidnappers and murderers from using city property to stage and execute their kidnappings and murders.
A five year-old child kidnapped by the kidnapping squads has been returned home to his father, following a judge's order that they do so. This was the child who had been seized and then used as bait to try and get others to come out of the house where they could be kidnapped. The judge's ruling is short, brutal, and references significant portions of the United States Constitution that the kidnapping and murder squads have proclaimed they do not need to follow.
When the kidnappers and murderers do release persons from their facilities, they often do so without providing any means for those people to stay warm enough to get back to their homes and/or the possessions that were left behind when they were seized. There are volunteers filling this gap, providing warmth and coats for those who need them. So much so that they've asked people to stop giving them coats, after the outpouring was so swift and voluminous.
Extrajudicial methods are increasingly popular for a host of reasons, but one of lesser one is how much the Department responsible for prosecution sucks at their jobs, a very different suckitude than everyone previous.
While there isn't any historical precedent for the current regime's most fascist slogan yet, the fact that they're pulling slogans from places that sound very fascist means it's a fascist slogan now.
And in return, they get some slogans of their own. An Olympic skier with apparently exquisite penile penmanship pissed a protest in the snow against the kidnapping and murder squads at the Olympic Games.
Because they are petty, this administration has decided they will stop flying the rainbow flag at the national monument to the Stonewall Riots. The people responsible for doing the deed said they were simply following the updated flag guidance that has been in place for a while, but of course, this administration has been hard at work trying to make sure they erase all the people who aren't straight, white, Christian men.
The correct answer to the presence of a monopoly is to burn it to the ground, and Representative Ocasio-Cortez is more than ready to throw both accelerant and the ignition on such monopolies in health "care".
A corrupt official in the Justice Department holding more than $150,000 USD of investments in cryptocurrency killed investigations into cryptocurrency and the largely scammy, unregulated environment it operates in. And several other persons in the administration are very friendly with crypto and otherwise against requirements that government officials should abide by ethics and not have conflicts of interest in the pursuit of their jobs.
To help inflate the ego of the current administrator, and provide some grift as well, military servicepeople are potentially being pressured by their commanders to see the movie about the current administrator's current wife.
Because of the absolute muppets in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and their complete belief that modern medicine is either ineffective or actively harmful, actual harmful pathogens, like measles, are making a resurgence and threatening to revoke the status of elimination in the United States. And also, the insistence on products unsafe for consumption as somehow more healthy and appropriate leads to preventable deaths of infants. While they also refuse authorizations and applications for technologies that could prove useful against some of our most vexing pathogens, because the person in charge of Health and Human Services believes in conspiracy theories about gene rewriting through vaccination.
The chatbot deployed to champion the Health and Human Services' vision of healthy people had no trouble recommending people foods based on whether they could be inserted into the rectum easily. It does, however, seem to have at least suggested preparing the foods in ways so that they will not get lost into the rectum once inserted? So, score another one for chatbots deployed despite their clear vulnerabilities and limitations.
The administration's head of cyber security uploaded sensitive documents to a public-facing instance of ChatGPT. Because these are the kind of people who believe they have to use certain things to make certain people happy, or because they think they're going to be useful tools when it's been proven they're anything but.
Because these people suck so much at their jobs, they're trying to force the oligopolies that collect unnecessary amounts of data on you and your social posts to give them that data so they can harrass their critics and the people that report on the movements of the kidnapping and murder squads.
The administration has decided, once again, that reality doesn't work with their worldview, and rescinded a finding that said greenhouse gases were dangerous and needed to be regulated. No doubt on the insistence of all the people who don't like having their profits curtailed by such bothersome things as health and safety requirements. (And because it came into existence during the Obama presidency, and we already know what this administrator's opinion of the Obamas is.)
All in all, when the vice-administrator compared the situation of the United States to the Titanic, he was spot-on, including the fact that the current administration intends to drive straight into the iceberg and sink the ship, mostly because they feel there are "undeserving" people in steerage that they're willing to condemn all the first-class passengers for.
All of this was predictable, and laid out in the Project 2025 document, and yet, the media organizations that needed to stick their heads out the window and see if it was raining instead chose the safety and comfort of printing "both sides" so that they wouldn't end up being targeted (more than they already were), and even that gambit failed them. It was all there, but they chose to believe the denial of an avowed and inveterate liar carried more weight than the document itself and the evidence that strongly suggested this was a playbook for him to use. And now they are performing a surprised Pikachu, because their livelihoods demanded they not understand something, and it's coming to pass, just like they were told it would by people who knew what they were talking about and not lying to them.
The incoming mayor of New York City operates on a simple and fundamental principle: what happens if government works, and always works? If he can manage that with himself and his administration, then he paves the way for the loftier goals he has for improving the lives of those in the city. But if he can even just establish a baseline where government services work and are responsive to the needs of the residents, he'll have already greatly improved their lives.
In technology, China has banned having hidden door handles for electric vehicles, taking place 1 January 2007, without there also being mechanical releases for doors both outside and inside the vehicle. Presumably, also easily visible ones that you can find and use in a crisis situation.
Solid-state drives are subject to corruption if they are left without power for too long, but too long is years on end, so you don't want to try and use the "non-volatile" memory for long-term storage. Har, har, har.
Adobe intended to discontinue the Animate product, which most of us know better as Macromedia Flash, but user and subscriber outcry reversed the decision. Possibly because Adobe was hoping to make more money faster by shoveling "AI" features and other such things into their products, instead of supporting reliable software that provides them with sensible and steady income.
Having been bullied into giving control to a U.S. company, the new TikTok Terms and Conditions are worse and terrible than the prvious not great Terms and Conditions were.
The Discord platform is assuming that you're a teenager, unless your have managed to convince it you're an adult, or you provide it with a face scan or a government identification to prove otherwise. Which is drawing extremely large amounts of flak from the userbase, and is almost certainly being done because of the wave of moral panic and associated legislation that is demanding that platforms monitor the age of the people on their platforms and then prevent certain kinds of interaction, or set a maximum limit on time spent on the platform, or any number of significantly absurd things, in the service of keeping teens safe from preying adults and terrible algorithms and other such things that the onus would really be on the platform creators to provide appropriate tools for or to employ enough moderators to scrub out, rather than age verification measures or similar. Since the initial forms of verification have found to be ineffective against determined privacy advocates, some users may find their personal data being stored on servers associated with Peter Thiel. Which will only make them more mad, and also, creates another potential identification breach point.
After realizing how they would be pilloried for going through with it, Ring decided they didn't want a partnership with Flock after all. They're still both companies that are feeding data to kidnappers and murderers without requiring them to go through the correct processes of obtaining court orders for that data.
There's a somewhat profitable enterprise for men to film women while they're out on the town or going to and from various clubs, trying to take advantage of being innocuous and the public setting to capture more intimate or more sexualized angles of people who aren't trying to do any such thing, and who definitely didn't consent to being sexualized in such a way. Reminds me of the commentary of someone who was riding a subway and was pointing out to their companion about all the various technological and less-technological means that some of the creepier riders were using to try and get a peek up the skirts of other riders on the train.
Because people who sell software used to compromise the security of other people's phones and upload their information to someone who wants to spy on them aren't necessarily interested in their own security, someone hacked their servers and obtained the payment records and associated e-mail addresses for those who are slimy enough to have paid for stalkerware.
So it started with an LLM trying to get changes merged into a codebase. Those changes were rejected. So the LLM then generated and posted a hit piece on the person that rejected its contributions. And now we find that Ars Technical published, and then retracted, an article about the hit piece that used LLM-generated quotes without attribution. The person responsible has apologized and said that they were sick and rushing and accidentally used an LLM-generated summary of the blog post in response to the hit piece, instead of proper quotation. Of course, one wonders exactly why any journalist of any salt is using an LLM in any capacity related to their work.
Attempting to control all aspects of your life toward a theoretical maximization of longevity instead turns into a maximization of misery.
The Association for Computing Machinery has turned their digital library into an open-access resource, providing their papers and other materials for free and making it more likely those artifacts will be used and cited in other pieces of research or practical applications.
The Central Intelligence Agency's most nonpartisan and useful resource, the World Factbook, is no longer being updated. Which is a shame, because that was one of the few useful unclassified things to come out of the CIA, and invaluable to a generation of researchers who were doing their country reports and needed something more than the barebones entity that an encyclopedia entry might provide for some of the lesser-known countries of the world.
Last out for tonight, The ways that the mountie falls off the pedestal, and the way that everyone tries to be a bit more like the mountie in due South, which makes the characters and the show better all the time.
The passive-aggressive technique of triangulation, where a person uses a third party to express their difficulties with, or to engage in bullying of, another person. Which I have apparently been victimized by, and only found out after the person who was doing it had left the organization. Which I still have massive issues with, because I prefer direct feedback rather than indirect feedback as both as a "I can't fix what I don't know about" issue, but also because people complaining about me instead of to me was also things that the manager who wanted to fire me took into account. Without telling me there were problems.
And a laugh: Accusations of penis enlargement to provide more lift for ski-jumping costuming in the 2026 Olympics. Yes, we have gotten to the point where penis size matters. Clearly, the condom suppliers didn't get the memo.
(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.)
