![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet's begin with this: the fish doorbell is active again! See fish on the camera, push the button to have the keeper go and let them through.
A lovely profile on Diane Duane, who has been in fandom and making fandom and having her own fandom for many decades at this point.
Bruce Campbell, star of Evil Dead, Brisco County, Jr., Bubba Ho-Tep, and frequent guest star on Xena: Warrior Princess, among other roles, revealed a cancer diagnosis that was going to make his tour for a new movie come up short. Gods-cursed cancer. Here's hoping Bruce can beat it and the treatments are effective.
Permission to use more modern music in figure skating programs has meant an entire series of headaches to obtain copyright clearances to use the music, because skating has not yet worked out appropriate blanket licensing permissions, I guess, with all the relevant countries and possible artists. I'm interested as to why copyright holders and/or companies would reject the use of their music during skating programs or the Olympics, outside of "this person using this music is not someone we want associated with the music."
Because the United States is not a safe place to be, nor to try and enter and exit legally, the Ig Nobel Prizes have moved their award ceremony to Zurich, Switzerland. The Annals of Improbable Research have found something far too probable, about the way that U.S. immigration is treating everyone, so they went somewhere safer.
The bellicose actions of the current administrator poll at one in four support, which doesn't actually change anything about his execution of such actions, but at least points out that the population is definitely not behind it. Even less so when it looks like the country is responsible for the destruction of a girls' school and the deaths of those who were attending because they didn't give enough of a shit about making sure they weren't hitting civilian targets.
Several members of the House of Representatives' Republican caucus posted anti-Muslim statements, since the Islamic Republic of Iran is a target again. When called on their statements, the representatives and their Speaker and leader of the house caucus either reiterated their remarks or did not censure the representatives for their statements. (Not that we expect the Speaker to do so, as he probably believes the same and is letting the other representatives say it instead of himself. And, of course, because there's no way that a mainstream publication would let itself publish something that was fully and solely sympathetic to Muslims, there's a paragraph or two at the end about how Jewish lawmakers are also receiving anti-Semitic remarks, as if Jews and Muslims are on opposite sides of some field, instead of both being popular targets for phobic remarks about themselves and their religious practices.
The kidnapping and murder squads are not just snatching people off the streets, they're trying to manipulate the court system so that they can then treat asylum seekers and others who have credible fear with expedited removal, and they're also trying to drown the immigration court system in cases so that the judges will be inclined to move quickly so as to try and clear the backlog.
They also are willing to lie and play up what they think will get sympathy for them, claiming buildings have been seized by gangs and justifying midnight raids and brutal tactics, when the actual reasons are more pedestrian, like people snitching that there might be undocumented people in apartments in retaliation for inspection failures, lack of appropriate security by the managers and owners, and the managing company and owner attempting to remove tenants because of their perceived national origin.
Proton AG, a Switzerland-based company, through international cooperative agreements between police agencies, provided information to the U.S. FBI that de-anonymized a protester in Atlanta. And while there were plenty of people quick to blame the protestor for using a method of payment that could be linked and traced back to them, there's also the part where a company that wants to be seen as privacy-protecting really should do a better job of making it harder for useful data to be surrendered, even in full compliance with legal requests from local authorities. Yes, the weak link here is the credit card, because the credit card companies track everything, but surely there's some way for companies to store only the minimum amount of information needed for their purposes, like "yep, this transaction token means this account is in good standing. No, we don't have any additional information past that, we've already forgotten everything but the token." You can't surrender what you don't have, and collecting the absolute minimum necessary has been a good practice in my profession for decades at this point.
The ACLU is joining a lawsuit by a citizen against a Kansas police department who, after writing an op-ed critical of them and their cooperation with the kidnap and murder squads, chose to use surveillance technology to follow their critic around and explicitly tell officers that they had to make up a proper reason to harass or arrest the person. Which, you know, they do deserve criticism, considering that the kidnap and murder squads left an old, blind, non English-speaking man that they had previously violently arrested to die, without notifying his family what they had done, and without caring.
The kidnap and murder squads don't need to deal with warrants or their lack if they can just purchase location data for people from companies that collect it as part of gameplay or advertising. And the kidnap and murder squads were doing just that, spending their money to let private companies track the people they're interested in, instead of having to do it themselves. Ad-blockers are very much a part of our safety, and that there are platforms still actively trying to prevent us from blocking ads (because their revenue depends on it) makes all of us less safe for having to use them. Some of the people in the ad industry have finally realized that they have been consistently making wrong decisions on their adtech path, but many more, I suspect, still think they've done nothing wrong.
The Bureau of Prisons intends to detransition every trans inmate in their care, and to furthermore treat all trans and gender-dysphoric inmates in their care as if they have a mental illness, and the document linked says they would be doing it anyway even without the executive order they cite as the impetus for this new policy. For those of you in the United States, while not a lawyer, I suspect those who are lawyers have a very strong case for arguing this doctrine is cruel and unusual punishment, since being trans usually has nothing to do with the commission of a crime that someone is arrested and imprisoned for, and is therefore forbidden by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Congress. Urging your representatives to conduct oversight and to be involved in the safeguarding of Constitutional rights, as well as urging them to get involved with greater oversight on what the kidnapping and murder squads are up to, is a good thing to do if you have time and free keystrokes or are willing to make a call.![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
thisfinecrew offers an e-mail or voice call script to use for your represented officials.
To beat those who would do violence to you and your neighbors, you need to know your neighbors, and to act in solidarity with them. Because the people who already have experience can tell you how to beat the fascists this time around. In addition to that, you can also speak with the one remaining voice that has been left to you, money, and remove products or find alternatives as a way of telling a company you are uninterested in their support of kidnapping and murder. (Which I will be a hypocrite on all the same, as the services that I have and use often fit my use case beautifully and there don't appear to be any others offering the same kind of services.)
Even small actions, like telling businesses to get their presence off of platforms that have CSAM-generators on them, and to have schools avoid feeding children to stochastic parrots, can have an impact and feel doable in this time.
It wasn't just you, there were not all that many jobs added to the economy in 2025, many fewer than were there in 2024. Almost like some political act happened that made the job market tighten up. And continue to do so.
The state of Kansas's license revocation for all trans people included someone who had never changed a gender marker on any documentation, just a name, suggesting that the state has been interested and keeping tabs on people far more than it would like you to believe. Nevermind the cruelty of the immediately-expired licenses, but it seems that Kansas went after all the trans people, not just the ones who had a gender marker change on their documentation.
Trying to remake Andy Warhol into someone palatable to right-wing reactionaries or tradCaths is an exercise in fundamentally warping Warhol.
A woman who has spent the bulk of her career advocating for regressive policies regarding women, cloaked under the various excuses or scapegoats, finds that even with all she's done for them, there are still critics who believe that she should not be allowed outside the home for any purpose at all, unless it's related to making or raising children. Even with all the damage she's been trying to do to feminism and to erase trans people, the people she desperately wants to notice her aren't satisfied with her. And she was somehow surprised that the leopards still intend to eat her face. Because as was laid bare by the smear campaign against Renee Nicole Good, merely being white isn't enough to protect you from white supremacy; you have to reify it and play your role in it, or you will be targeted as if you weren't white at all. Similarly, if you don't behave according to the way the people who have been brought up on a message that they claim is from the writings but is all about male supremacy and white supremacy, they will cast you aside, even kill you, and claim that you failed to live up to the tenets of the religion.
Places that are seen as boys' clubs and where women aren't welcome, or aren't capable of the necessary skills to compete, often become places of abuse for those women who do stick it out, and that includes pursuits like chess.
As with anything, if you do it solely to make number go up, then you're probably missing the point of doing the thing, reading included. The point being teased out is in the virtue of reading widely and encountering things and styles that you might not otherwise, which is good, but pushing someone's reading frontier is something to be done in little bits and pieces, after the initial spread of "here's a lot of things in different ways, see which ones you like." Numbers as a competitive measure are no help. Numbers as a way of getting someone to remember to devote time to enjoyment and as signs of progress, those are fine.
The state of Texas imposed upon the University of Texas system requirements that prevent academics from discussing "controversial topics," and anyone who knows the history of the States knows that some lives are always automatically "controversial." Academia is supposed to be about freedom to discuss things with adults who have the capacity to argue, sort arguments, call bullshit, and otherwise come to their own conclusions, supported by evidence. If that happens to make the State of Texas's history, or the history of the United States, look bad, that's nobody's fault but the poor actors of the past and present. In the K-12 area, a librarian has found herself in the position of having all her selection power taken away, reduced to simply recommending material to a committee, but also doing her very best to prevent book banners from taking things out of context, or having the governor's moral crusade stomp over what power the parents' committee has about selecting and deselecting material for the school district.
Some people regret becoming mothers, but in this piece, what I see repeatedly in those expressed regrets is the part where the mother was expected to do everything, with an insufficient social support net, and the understanding that any faults that developed, or diseases, disorders, or syndromes that manifested, would be blamed upon her and her raising of the child. There's so much in there about regretting a loss of freedom, and the infinite length of responsibility, and how much of the responsibility is put on her and no-one else. I wonder if there's quite as high or as strong a regret rate in places that actually provide a useful social net for mothers and children so that the responsibilities and the burdens get spread around, rather than being pressed completely upon one person.
Experiencing peak capitalism in the form of the Buc-ees gas station, where you get exactly what you expect.
The parent company of ReedPop, purveyor of many industry show comic conventions in various cities, is RX, whose parent company is RELX, which also owns LexisNexis, who are providing information to the kidnapping and murder squads. The parent company says all the children are treated at arm's length, and therefore there's no need to be alarmed. It's yet another example of how large conglomerates mean that even things like trying to participate in fandom can mean being at least tangentially connected to kidnapping and murder squads.
The National Football League is ridonkulously profitable for the owners, even though many of those owners already have more than enough for generations to come. What it doesn't guarantee is that money will buy championships. And, in fact, many of the rich people suck at running winning teams, even if they don't have to worry about the teams not being profitable. Green Bay, which operates as a non-profit, publicly-owned team, on the other hand, is still profitable, and has the most dedicated fan base in any league, because they own shares in the team itself.
To pretend something is not there is to tell the people who are suffering from it that they do not exist, either. It was possible that we could have stopped so much of the pain and suffering, and instead we have to continue suffering from willful ignorance and the compounded problems of such. Grief and ritual must be observed, and even then, it doesn't mean that there's an end point or an inevitability that will happen. Woe to those who push people to get over their grief, and fie on those who insist that their product is inevitable and unstoppable.cosmolinguistLoons die from lead poisoning, often contributed by lead sinkers in fishing tackle. Other wildlife often dies by lead poisoning or effects, contributed by lead in bullets used to hunt wildlife. Slowly, lead is being phased out, but there's still too many things dying from lead and its effects.
Japanese knotweed is considered invasive and fast-moving, but like many things in nature, it may have other benefits. And the chemical often used to kill plants and weeds, glyphosate, may have worse consequences than living with a plant in your area.
In technology, The state of California now mandates that all computer operating systems must perform an age request step at the setup of accounts, and make the age bracket of the account holder available in some way to application stores and apps themselves. *sigh* Moral panics know no bounds, and people who are still worried that teenagers are using the grown-up internet will not be satisfied until they have made the entire Internet safe for toddlers. While the comments suggest that it will be something like "you can put in whatever birthdate you like and that will be the end of it," I'm sure that California is looking to do more than merely put a speed bump in the way. In the same way that Google is looking to lock down control over the Android mobile operating system in the same way that Apple has done over iOS and require everyone who wants to be part of their walled garden to register with them for the privilege.
Getting a shingles shot may help with other conditions that come with age, like dementia, although the mechanism hasn't been isolated yet, and they're still trying to pin it down to make it more of a "yes" rather than a "maybe."
The Supreme Court of the United States denied to hear the appeal where people using generative programs to create art wanted copyright protection for them, letting stand a lower court decision says such works can't be copyrighted because they lack a human author.
Through persistence and being willing to stand up to a copyright troll manipulating a trade industry's service to file takedown requests on behalf of members, a game known as Cookie's Bustle can once again be shown and preserved. The peice is very good about showing all the ways that the copyright takedown system is tilted heavily in favor of people who want to file nuisance takedowns, and that the people who respond need to have a willingness to stand up to them, but also that it's hard to do when if your counter-notice fails or otherwise there is a lawsuit, the penalties could be very stiff indeed.
As with so many things, what Facebook says is the power of artificial intelligence is actually the work of underpaid people outside of the country the glasses are being sold in. Those workers are saying the glasses do not stop recording, and that the workers in Africa and other places in the world get to see everything the glasses see, because their jobs are in classification, tagging, and otherwise training the computer models on the massive amounts of content that the glasses' cameras see.
A study with toddlers and toys powered by stochastic parrots finds that the toys are more than useless for giving quality interactions for a toddler, misreading toddler emotions, not participating in conversations well, and otherwise not understanding who they're "talking" with.
Grammarly rolled out a service where its Avian Intelligence would provide feedback in the style of several well-known authors, editors, critics, and such. And then, very quickly afterward, disabled the feature in the face of loud and vicious feedback from the people who were being imitated by the Avian Intelligence.
Stochastic parrots do not have moral compasses, or any tether to reality, so they will happily indulge and reinforce anyone's view of what is real and important, regardless of whether that's helpful, harmful, or entirely disconnected from the world. It's hard to pull someone back when they've gotten themselves deeply invested and have a sycophantic machine that will enable them all the way to everything.
Last for tonight, Black Africans are everywhere in history, including in places where the average studier has their focus pinned down to the whiter side of Europe, instead of the greater world Latin Christendom interacted with.
And a searchable database of ukiyo-e prints through several eras of Japanese carving and printmaking.
(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 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.)
A lovely profile on Diane Duane, who has been in fandom and making fandom and having her own fandom for many decades at this point.
Bruce Campbell, star of Evil Dead, Brisco County, Jr., Bubba Ho-Tep, and frequent guest star on Xena: Warrior Princess, among other roles, revealed a cancer diagnosis that was going to make his tour for a new movie come up short. Gods-cursed cancer. Here's hoping Bruce can beat it and the treatments are effective.
Permission to use more modern music in figure skating programs has meant an entire series of headaches to obtain copyright clearances to use the music, because skating has not yet worked out appropriate blanket licensing permissions, I guess, with all the relevant countries and possible artists. I'm interested as to why copyright holders and/or companies would reject the use of their music during skating programs or the Olympics, outside of "this person using this music is not someone we want associated with the music."
Because the United States is not a safe place to be, nor to try and enter and exit legally, the Ig Nobel Prizes have moved their award ceremony to Zurich, Switzerland. The Annals of Improbable Research have found something far too probable, about the way that U.S. immigration is treating everyone, so they went somewhere safer.
The bellicose actions of the current administrator poll at one in four support, which doesn't actually change anything about his execution of such actions, but at least points out that the population is definitely not behind it. Even less so when it looks like the country is responsible for the destruction of a girls' school and the deaths of those who were attending because they didn't give enough of a shit about making sure they weren't hitting civilian targets.
Several members of the House of Representatives' Republican caucus posted anti-Muslim statements, since the Islamic Republic of Iran is a target again. When called on their statements, the representatives and their Speaker and leader of the house caucus either reiterated their remarks or did not censure the representatives for their statements. (Not that we expect the Speaker to do so, as he probably believes the same and is letting the other representatives say it instead of himself. And, of course, because there's no way that a mainstream publication would let itself publish something that was fully and solely sympathetic to Muslims, there's a paragraph or two at the end about how Jewish lawmakers are also receiving anti-Semitic remarks, as if Jews and Muslims are on opposite sides of some field, instead of both being popular targets for phobic remarks about themselves and their religious practices.
The kidnapping and murder squads are not just snatching people off the streets, they're trying to manipulate the court system so that they can then treat asylum seekers and others who have credible fear with expedited removal, and they're also trying to drown the immigration court system in cases so that the judges will be inclined to move quickly so as to try and clear the backlog.
They also are willing to lie and play up what they think will get sympathy for them, claiming buildings have been seized by gangs and justifying midnight raids and brutal tactics, when the actual reasons are more pedestrian, like people snitching that there might be undocumented people in apartments in retaliation for inspection failures, lack of appropriate security by the managers and owners, and the managing company and owner attempting to remove tenants because of their perceived national origin.
Proton AG, a Switzerland-based company, through international cooperative agreements between police agencies, provided information to the U.S. FBI that de-anonymized a protester in Atlanta. And while there were plenty of people quick to blame the protestor for using a method of payment that could be linked and traced back to them, there's also the part where a company that wants to be seen as privacy-protecting really should do a better job of making it harder for useful data to be surrendered, even in full compliance with legal requests from local authorities. Yes, the weak link here is the credit card, because the credit card companies track everything, but surely there's some way for companies to store only the minimum amount of information needed for their purposes, like "yep, this transaction token means this account is in good standing. No, we don't have any additional information past that, we've already forgotten everything but the token." You can't surrender what you don't have, and collecting the absolute minimum necessary has been a good practice in my profession for decades at this point.
The ACLU is joining a lawsuit by a citizen against a Kansas police department who, after writing an op-ed critical of them and their cooperation with the kidnap and murder squads, chose to use surveillance technology to follow their critic around and explicitly tell officers that they had to make up a proper reason to harass or arrest the person. Which, you know, they do deserve criticism, considering that the kidnap and murder squads left an old, blind, non English-speaking man that they had previously violently arrested to die, without notifying his family what they had done, and without caring.
The kidnap and murder squads don't need to deal with warrants or their lack if they can just purchase location data for people from companies that collect it as part of gameplay or advertising. And the kidnap and murder squads were doing just that, spending their money to let private companies track the people they're interested in, instead of having to do it themselves. Ad-blockers are very much a part of our safety, and that there are platforms still actively trying to prevent us from blocking ads (because their revenue depends on it) makes all of us less safe for having to use them. Some of the people in the ad industry have finally realized that they have been consistently making wrong decisions on their adtech path, but many more, I suspect, still think they've done nothing wrong.
The Bureau of Prisons intends to detransition every trans inmate in their care, and to furthermore treat all trans and gender-dysphoric inmates in their care as if they have a mental illness, and the document linked says they would be doing it anyway even without the executive order they cite as the impetus for this new policy. For those of you in the United States, while not a lawyer, I suspect those who are lawyers have a very strong case for arguing this doctrine is cruel and unusual punishment, since being trans usually has nothing to do with the commission of a crime that someone is arrested and imprisoned for, and is therefore forbidden by the Eighth Amendment to the United States Congress. Urging your representatives to conduct oversight and to be involved in the safeguarding of Constitutional rights, as well as urging them to get involved with greater oversight on what the kidnapping and murder squads are up to, is a good thing to do if you have time and free keystrokes or are willing to make a call.
thisfinecrew offers an e-mail or voice call script to use for your represented officials.To beat those who would do violence to you and your neighbors, you need to know your neighbors, and to act in solidarity with them. Because the people who already have experience can tell you how to beat the fascists this time around. In addition to that, you can also speak with the one remaining voice that has been left to you, money, and remove products or find alternatives as a way of telling a company you are uninterested in their support of kidnapping and murder. (Which I will be a hypocrite on all the same, as the services that I have and use often fit my use case beautifully and there don't appear to be any others offering the same kind of services.)
Even small actions, like telling businesses to get their presence off of platforms that have CSAM-generators on them, and to have schools avoid feeding children to stochastic parrots, can have an impact and feel doable in this time.
It wasn't just you, there were not all that many jobs added to the economy in 2025, many fewer than were there in 2024. Almost like some political act happened that made the job market tighten up. And continue to do so.
The state of Kansas's license revocation for all trans people included someone who had never changed a gender marker on any documentation, just a name, suggesting that the state has been interested and keeping tabs on people far more than it would like you to believe. Nevermind the cruelty of the immediately-expired licenses, but it seems that Kansas went after all the trans people, not just the ones who had a gender marker change on their documentation.
Trying to remake Andy Warhol into someone palatable to right-wing reactionaries or tradCaths is an exercise in fundamentally warping Warhol.
A woman who has spent the bulk of her career advocating for regressive policies regarding women, cloaked under the various excuses or scapegoats, finds that even with all she's done for them, there are still critics who believe that she should not be allowed outside the home for any purpose at all, unless it's related to making or raising children. Even with all the damage she's been trying to do to feminism and to erase trans people, the people she desperately wants to notice her aren't satisfied with her. And she was somehow surprised that the leopards still intend to eat her face. Because as was laid bare by the smear campaign against Renee Nicole Good, merely being white isn't enough to protect you from white supremacy; you have to reify it and play your role in it, or you will be targeted as if you weren't white at all. Similarly, if you don't behave according to the way the people who have been brought up on a message that they claim is from the writings but is all about male supremacy and white supremacy, they will cast you aside, even kill you, and claim that you failed to live up to the tenets of the religion.
Places that are seen as boys' clubs and where women aren't welcome, or aren't capable of the necessary skills to compete, often become places of abuse for those women who do stick it out, and that includes pursuits like chess.
As with anything, if you do it solely to make number go up, then you're probably missing the point of doing the thing, reading included. The point being teased out is in the virtue of reading widely and encountering things and styles that you might not otherwise, which is good, but pushing someone's reading frontier is something to be done in little bits and pieces, after the initial spread of "here's a lot of things in different ways, see which ones you like." Numbers as a competitive measure are no help. Numbers as a way of getting someone to remember to devote time to enjoyment and as signs of progress, those are fine.
The state of Texas imposed upon the University of Texas system requirements that prevent academics from discussing "controversial topics," and anyone who knows the history of the States knows that some lives are always automatically "controversial." Academia is supposed to be about freedom to discuss things with adults who have the capacity to argue, sort arguments, call bullshit, and otherwise come to their own conclusions, supported by evidence. If that happens to make the State of Texas's history, or the history of the United States, look bad, that's nobody's fault but the poor actors of the past and present. In the K-12 area, a librarian has found herself in the position of having all her selection power taken away, reduced to simply recommending material to a committee, but also doing her very best to prevent book banners from taking things out of context, or having the governor's moral crusade stomp over what power the parents' committee has about selecting and deselecting material for the school district.
Some people regret becoming mothers, but in this piece, what I see repeatedly in those expressed regrets is the part where the mother was expected to do everything, with an insufficient social support net, and the understanding that any faults that developed, or diseases, disorders, or syndromes that manifested, would be blamed upon her and her raising of the child. There's so much in there about regretting a loss of freedom, and the infinite length of responsibility, and how much of the responsibility is put on her and no-one else. I wonder if there's quite as high or as strong a regret rate in places that actually provide a useful social net for mothers and children so that the responsibilities and the burdens get spread around, rather than being pressed completely upon one person.
Experiencing peak capitalism in the form of the Buc-ees gas station, where you get exactly what you expect.
The parent company of ReedPop, purveyor of many industry show comic conventions in various cities, is RX, whose parent company is RELX, which also owns LexisNexis, who are providing information to the kidnapping and murder squads. The parent company says all the children are treated at arm's length, and therefore there's no need to be alarmed. It's yet another example of how large conglomerates mean that even things like trying to participate in fandom can mean being at least tangentially connected to kidnapping and murder squads.
The National Football League is ridonkulously profitable for the owners, even though many of those owners already have more than enough for generations to come. What it doesn't guarantee is that money will buy championships. And, in fact, many of the rich people suck at running winning teams, even if they don't have to worry about the teams not being profitable. Green Bay, which operates as a non-profit, publicly-owned team, on the other hand, is still profitable, and has the most dedicated fan base in any league, because they own shares in the team itself.
To pretend something is not there is to tell the people who are suffering from it that they do not exist, either. It was possible that we could have stopped so much of the pain and suffering, and instead we have to continue suffering from willful ignorance and the compounded problems of such. Grief and ritual must be observed, and even then, it doesn't mean that there's an end point or an inevitability that will happen. Woe to those who push people to get over their grief, and fie on those who insist that their product is inevitable and unstoppable.
cosmolinguistLoons die from lead poisoning, often contributed by lead sinkers in fishing tackle. Other wildlife often dies by lead poisoning or effects, contributed by lead in bullets used to hunt wildlife. Slowly, lead is being phased out, but there's still too many things dying from lead and its effects.Japanese knotweed is considered invasive and fast-moving, but like many things in nature, it may have other benefits. And the chemical often used to kill plants and weeds, glyphosate, may have worse consequences than living with a plant in your area.
In technology, The state of California now mandates that all computer operating systems must perform an age request step at the setup of accounts, and make the age bracket of the account holder available in some way to application stores and apps themselves. *sigh* Moral panics know no bounds, and people who are still worried that teenagers are using the grown-up internet will not be satisfied until they have made the entire Internet safe for toddlers. While the comments suggest that it will be something like "you can put in whatever birthdate you like and that will be the end of it," I'm sure that California is looking to do more than merely put a speed bump in the way. In the same way that Google is looking to lock down control over the Android mobile operating system in the same way that Apple has done over iOS and require everyone who wants to be part of their walled garden to register with them for the privilege.
Getting a shingles shot may help with other conditions that come with age, like dementia, although the mechanism hasn't been isolated yet, and they're still trying to pin it down to make it more of a "yes" rather than a "maybe."
The Supreme Court of the United States denied to hear the appeal where people using generative programs to create art wanted copyright protection for them, letting stand a lower court decision says such works can't be copyrighted because they lack a human author.
Through persistence and being willing to stand up to a copyright troll manipulating a trade industry's service to file takedown requests on behalf of members, a game known as Cookie's Bustle can once again be shown and preserved. The peice is very good about showing all the ways that the copyright takedown system is tilted heavily in favor of people who want to file nuisance takedowns, and that the people who respond need to have a willingness to stand up to them, but also that it's hard to do when if your counter-notice fails or otherwise there is a lawsuit, the penalties could be very stiff indeed.
As with so many things, what Facebook says is the power of artificial intelligence is actually the work of underpaid people outside of the country the glasses are being sold in. Those workers are saying the glasses do not stop recording, and that the workers in Africa and other places in the world get to see everything the glasses see, because their jobs are in classification, tagging, and otherwise training the computer models on the massive amounts of content that the glasses' cameras see.
A study with toddlers and toys powered by stochastic parrots finds that the toys are more than useless for giving quality interactions for a toddler, misreading toddler emotions, not participating in conversations well, and otherwise not understanding who they're "talking" with.
Grammarly rolled out a service where its Avian Intelligence would provide feedback in the style of several well-known authors, editors, critics, and such. And then, very quickly afterward, disabled the feature in the face of loud and vicious feedback from the people who were being imitated by the Avian Intelligence.
Stochastic parrots do not have moral compasses, or any tether to reality, so they will happily indulge and reinforce anyone's view of what is real and important, regardless of whether that's helpful, harmful, or entirely disconnected from the world. It's hard to pull someone back when they've gotten themselves deeply invested and have a sycophantic machine that will enable them all the way to everything.
Last for tonight, Black Africans are everywhere in history, including in places where the average studier has their focus pinned down to the whiter side of Europe, instead of the greater world Latin Christendom interacted with.
And a searchable database of ukiyo-e prints through several eras of Japanese carving and printmaking.
(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: 2026-03-17 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-17 01:23 am (UTC)