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silveradeptLet us begin with a pair of bad decisions. The first is that someone enterprising stored a case of cans' worth of beer in one of the microfilm storage areas in an archives. The second bad decision is that they chose Natural Light as the beer to store. Natty Light and PBR are the things that someone drinks at university because they're cheap and terrible, and if you're at Duke, presumably, you have both the means and the willingness to drink better beer than that. I still wouldn't store beer in the microfilm area, because, well, warm beer is nobody's friend, either.
Snaaaaake, snaaaaake, ooooooh, it's a snaaaaake! (has been inducted into the British Film Institue's Archives.)
Pictures from a Black Fae Fest in Georgia, which I love primarily because of all the fae there having a good time. (Admittedly, the idea of Black fae was not much of an issue for me - a collegiate production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Queen of the fairies (Drag Queen of the Fairies, at the bare minimum) and the King of the Fairies throwing up the hood of his hoodie to turn invisible.)
An accurate obituary for Ted Turner, who, as billionaires went, was eccentric, but also had some good ideas, and certainly turned aside from the path of being a completely evil man. Even though he cursed us with CNN.
The UK's Equalities and Human Rights Commission released new guidelines based on a Supreme Court ruling. The rules, as described, and with examples in the guidelines, seem to say that trans people clearly cannot choose the toilet in front of them, but they also clearly cannot choose the toilet in front of the other person, and therefore they have to have some secret third option available to them. Similarly for other kinds of situations, where it's "well, they acn be excluded based on these characteristics, and they can't be excluded based on those same characteristics in different circumstances. Splitting hairs in this manner generally goes poorly for everyone, but the people who feel entitled to discriminate will feel they're finally able to get what they want.
A story about a pair of twins whose eggs were fertilized by different people's sperm, and their quest to find their fathers. The problem with the story as written up and framed is that it's leaning into the possible salaciousness of the situation: to have had this happen, there had to have been multiple eggs released, multiple partners with sperm, and then it spirals outward into a story of abandonment and neglect, dementia and DNA testing and finding and uncovering the skeletons in the closet. While it might end with the two siblings having a strong bond as before, there's a lot there in it that is the kind of thing described in watching a disaster unfold in front of you: you don't want to watch it, because you know it will hurt people, but you can't stop watching, because you want to see what happens.
The cost of war is staggering in the direct costs, and even more so in the indirect ones, and therefore it requires a significant amount of public investment to do properly and not cause all the deleterious effects that the current administrator is facing. I think he was at his most honest when he said he didn't care about the people of the United States at all when he was thinking about the consequences of his actions.
A person finally won their case with the National Health Service in the UK to get their tubes tied, rather than constantly being diverted toward other forms of contraception. As is noted, the treatment of penises and Fallopian tubes in this arena is markedly different, often based on the idea that the person with Fallopian tubes asking for the permanent option will regret it later on in life, while the person with the penis won't. Paternalistic attitudes in medicine still abound, and they are not always easy to uproot and send away.
Several vengeful men are out to use the power of the courts to get doctors prescribing abortion medication to women in states that prohibit abortions prosecuted, fined, or otherwise driven out of business, but they choose poor avenues, poor reasons, and poor people to prosecute their cases.
The racist intentions of the decision gutting the Voting Rights Act are already providing fruit, as states race to use their power of drawing Congressional districts in ways that will benefit their party, rather than provide anyone the possibility of being represented fairly and accurately.
The green light that the administration has given to racial animus, and its willingness to believe in "reverse racism" and other white-supremacist signals has emboldened others to act accordingly, like a white dermatologist suing a "find a black doctor" directory for discrimination because the white doctor's practice was not germane to the directory's purpose and his application was excluded. Of course, the aggrieved white man cries "discrimination" because he thinks he can get a sympathetic ear and judge to rule in his favor, and if not that, to get a case before the racists at SCOTUS and let them gut civil rights even more.
These are people that have admitted exactly three non-white people under refugee status, pointing out how much they believe in the idea that white people are the most oppressed people in the world.
When we say that John Roberts (and his majority) is an atypically-disciplined racist, I'm borrowing someone else's characterization of him, but also, it's a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the Court that he's been Chief Justice of over the last decade and a half of racist decisions that don't bother trying to make legal arguments for being racist. Callais joins the anti-canon of Court decisions, even as it tries to set up a world in which even Congress cannot tell the Court what its plain intent is and how they are supposed to rule upon matters involving a future law. So the Court should not be surprised if people start ensuring their voices are heard and they are represented in manners outside the political process.
The State Department's annual report on human rights issues around the world is significantly more barebones than it usually is, because the State Department realizes that accusations are highly likely to be confessions, or a proper accounting of human rights abuses would include countries that the current administrator is flirting heavily with.
The Federal Communications Commission put out a proposed rule that would add the existence of a queer person, or queer-positive content, as content that would increase the rating and require disclosure for any program that contained queer people or queer content. Because hatchet-men will swing their axes wherever they can find them, regardless of who gets hurt.
The state of Minnesota prohibited prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. The federal government sued immediately, saying that prediction markets are exclusively the province of a specific federal agency, and therefore federal preempts state on this. And, of course, they would move swiftly, considering how many people there are with potential insider information they could use to rig a prediction market in favor of their own position. Can't have a state banning the possibility of making oodles of money for yourself, after all. Wouldn't be in line with the priorities of this administration.
Donald Trump ordered Donald Trump to never audit Donald Trump or his family again, and to boot, to give Donald Trump 1.8 billion USD to distribute to his followers and allies who were properly prosecuted for crimes they committed . It's supposedly a "settlement," but if it is, it's a setlement between Donald Trump and Donald Trump, so there's no adversarial parties, a there's no judge in this situation, either. It's all corruption, all the time, in this administration, and they're not really bothering to hide it at this point.
A contractor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the government maintained a public GitHub repository that included sensitive credentials to access the government's Amazon Web Services GovCloud infrastructure and several other projects related to CISA at a high level of authority. You always have to be careful about leaking your secrets when you publish to repositories, and it looks like the person who published the thing explicitly disabled the options that prevent someone from publish those kinds of secrets accidentally, so they exposed keys, and had a plaintext file of usernames and passwords, and several other things that indicate poor security practice by the contractor. (And that some of the credentials for internal networks at CISA weren't very secure, either.) Considering how much CISA was targeted by the Elon Musk techbro crowd, and had their funding and staffing cut, this is the kind of thing that results.
A Nevada energy supplier to a California buyer has said they're going to stop supplying power to the California buyer, but they don't come out and say explicitly that they're stopping the power because a data center will pay them much more money for the power than those boring ol' California residents.
Data centers are also actively contributing to climate change and warming because they have to vent their waste heat somewhere.
The state of Delaware has provided the ultimate answer to the Citizens United Supreme Court case that declared corporations were people, by declaring that there have been no violations of the state constitution by any of the towns that allow corporations and other artificial entities to vote in their local elections, saying that since those entities own property and pay taxes, they should be allowed to have a say in who represents them in government.
There is some good news: the spurious charges filed against Kilmar Abrego Garcia have been dismissed with prejudice, based on the clear vindictiveness in which the federal government filed the charges. Because Mr. Abrego Garcia successfully sued the government based on his wrongful deportation to El Salvador, the Attorney General filed new charges, and made public statements about Mr. Abrego Garcia that made it clear he was doing this not out of justice, but out of revenge.
Tulsi Gabbard is out as Director of National Intelligence, which means, at the moment, there's one less henchperson doing the administrator's dirty work without pushing back at him about what a bad idea it is.
A 117-page ruling from a District Court in Kansas that finds the state's ban on gender-affirming care violates the Kansas State Constitution, and takes care to eviscerate the poor quality of the State's experts, respect the testimony of the people involved, and indicate the high quality of the scientific consensus affirming that gender-affirming care is helpful to minors who receive it. Because he was so thoroughly embarrassed by this ruling, the state's Attorney General promises to appeal the ruling, but with the amount of time and care taken in this takedown, I would be surprised if the appeals court or the state Supreme Court ruled differently than the district court has. ("Judicial activism!" they cry when it goes against them, not choosing to acknowledge that it is also judicial activism when they are ruled for.)
One of the previous CEOs of Google was booed at a commencement speech for being an AI shill, following on from the previous booing of an AI shill at the University of Central Florida. And he deserved every bit of it.
The Starbucks corporation has launched an investigation into how their South Korean arm managed to put through a promotional idea celebrating a military dictatorship in the country, and a time where the dictatorship fired upon protestors and otherwise hurt the people. The outcry about the promotion was swift and destructive, and so once word reached corporate HQ that this had happened, they acted swiftly to dismiss the person responsible and to apologize for the promotion. I wouldn't be surprised if the thought was for brand protection first, and then any other matters will be secondary to that, but they'll have enough time to put together an official reason why they shut down this kind of promotion that will seem much less self-serving and crass.
Misinformation abounds regarding perimenopause and menopause, including things around the need for contraception, or the need for hormone replacement theory, and so many other things, since this particular facet of life is often not talked about or studied in very direct manners.
The government should care more about bees, but the USDA is closing a laboratory just outside the Washington D.C. Beltway. Because they're not thinking about all the things that it is important for government to do, but instead about playing at war and looting the Treasury for their own enrichment.
In technology, Anthropic wants you to believe its AI will behave in moral ways, so it sought input about how to give it rules, first from Christian denominations, then, when reminded that not everyone is a Christian, nor wants to be governed by one, then met with other faith leaders with the same hopes and questions, none of which will be useful to them in terms of trying to get their random chance machine to behave in ways that are not random. But it makes them look like they're trying to work on the problem of morals and ethics in the use of their random chat machines. They've managed to get even Da Pope involved in this project, by positioning themselves as present and interested in the papal encyclical about avoiding technology and algorithms to conduct warfare and criticizing increases in spending for those purposes.
Perhaps more importantly and interestingly, a Stanford student, Myra Cheng, ran a study on the use of LLMs and found that they are generally sycophantic, that sycophancy continues, even when the prompts are about unethical, illegal, and harmful behaviors, and that the sycophancy makes people like and trust the LLM responses more than those of a human, even though the human is much more likely to give better advice in most of those situations. Or needed reality checks. So, if you need another reason to forswear the LLM, it's that it's buttering you up instead of giving you the straight talk.
An awful lot of medics are recording sessions and using algorithms to transcribe and take notes on them, including talk therapy people, which for some people is a big creep-out, because while the provider may assure you that everything is handled properly, it only takes one data breach to expose that idea as a lie, and a data breach doesn't necessarily mean the person was lying to you beforehand. But, once it's out of your control, there's a lot that could happen to it, and people who want human therapy often don't like the idea of confessing to a computer.The supposed benefits to the therapist are being able to handle a higher client load without falling behind on necessary documentation, but that's a symptom of the fact that to make a living, corporations demand that therapists have a classroom's worth of clients. You could, instead, have more therapists and make things easier for everyone. But that's not maximally profitable.
But if you were hoping to use an LLM to spice up your love life, or to indulge in a little erotica, no, the LLM can't be sexy, either, because there are too many fraught issues around what it will or won't do, and what happens to the things that people put into it. The person who created ELIZA recognized this, and worried about what people would tell an unsophisticated program, even though they knew it was a program. With the LLMs, of course, their repeated ability to do things that they have supposedly been banned from doing in their models makes them a risky play partner.
Viral trends on social media aren't necessarily organically viral. The clips are real, but the accounts posting them are getting paid to do it. Because if you're going to make it all the way to being a viral hit, you have to apparently grease the track sufficiently to go fast.
The Wikimedia Foundation appears to be moving in the direction of being terrible capitalist techbros instead of stewards of the Wiki and friends to the unionizing workers.
The Roku OS for most Roku devices has given over half of its screen real estate to a permanent advertisement. Because that monetization isn't going to do itself. And is yet again, another good reason to get devices with operating systems not controlled by media companies, because the ads are always going to be there. Of course, the other problem is that without some add-ons and some interesting, possibly dangerous, decisions, most services don't have a good way of integrating with something like Kodi. And in a world where fewer entities ever produce a file that you can download, it becomes even more fraught to want to own your media and play it on your terms.
The free pinball table, 3D Space Cadet, included in several versions of the Windows operating system is being built as a physical machine, and the person trying to build it is finding that translating the digital to the physical is fraught will all kinds of issues.
Last out, someone has compiled together operating systems across the decades and tweaked them so they run properly in emulation, as a museum and a way of allowing people to access older OSes and play in them. The full edition is about 174 GB uncompressed, the lite one a mere 21 GB uncompressed and will need to download anything not initially included. This is a good reason to fire up your BitTorrent client for both downloading and seeding, because holy shorts, that's a lot of OSes to look through.
A plea not to remove the thing that makes science work by trying to produce automation and non-human scientific pipelines to get faster results. Just so - new knowledge does not always come from rearranging old knowledge, but from the breakthroughs and evolutionary paths and inefficiencies that come from exploration.
Server Charms, a self-contained small network with a few HTML pages that runs on an ESP32 powered by recycled vape batteries. Which is about small and local networks, and hiding a server in plain sight, or in an art project. Reminds me of PirateBox and its insistence on creating a local network for file-sharing and chatting and other such things, albeit on slightly more power-hungry hardware for slightly more power-hungry applications. The idea of small things, very local, very low-powered, and not connected to the greater Internet, still appeals, although there's always the difficulty that connecting to unknown WiFi networks is not encouraged. If there were some way to help satiate the curiosity, and also potentially be a viable local network, that would be something interesting. I feel like this is the sort of thing that a student might use to generate a network away from prying eyes. Or anyone else who would like a small and local enclave they can use away from surveillance and with community at its heart. (Which would work very well with things like PirateBox.)
(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.)
Snaaaaake, snaaaaake, ooooooh, it's a snaaaaake! (has been inducted into the British Film Institue's Archives.)
Pictures from a Black Fae Fest in Georgia, which I love primarily because of all the fae there having a good time. (Admittedly, the idea of Black fae was not much of an issue for me - a collegiate production of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Queen of the fairies (Drag Queen of the Fairies, at the bare minimum) and the King of the Fairies throwing up the hood of his hoodie to turn invisible.)
An accurate obituary for Ted Turner, who, as billionaires went, was eccentric, but also had some good ideas, and certainly turned aside from the path of being a completely evil man. Even though he cursed us with CNN.
The UK's Equalities and Human Rights Commission released new guidelines based on a Supreme Court ruling. The rules, as described, and with examples in the guidelines, seem to say that trans people clearly cannot choose the toilet in front of them, but they also clearly cannot choose the toilet in front of the other person, and therefore they have to have some secret third option available to them. Similarly for other kinds of situations, where it's "well, they acn be excluded based on these characteristics, and they can't be excluded based on those same characteristics in different circumstances. Splitting hairs in this manner generally goes poorly for everyone, but the people who feel entitled to discriminate will feel they're finally able to get what they want.
A story about a pair of twins whose eggs were fertilized by different people's sperm, and their quest to find their fathers. The problem with the story as written up and framed is that it's leaning into the possible salaciousness of the situation: to have had this happen, there had to have been multiple eggs released, multiple partners with sperm, and then it spirals outward into a story of abandonment and neglect, dementia and DNA testing and finding and uncovering the skeletons in the closet. While it might end with the two siblings having a strong bond as before, there's a lot there in it that is the kind of thing described in watching a disaster unfold in front of you: you don't want to watch it, because you know it will hurt people, but you can't stop watching, because you want to see what happens.
The cost of war is staggering in the direct costs, and even more so in the indirect ones, and therefore it requires a significant amount of public investment to do properly and not cause all the deleterious effects that the current administrator is facing. I think he was at his most honest when he said he didn't care about the people of the United States at all when he was thinking about the consequences of his actions.
A person finally won their case with the National Health Service in the UK to get their tubes tied, rather than constantly being diverted toward other forms of contraception. As is noted, the treatment of penises and Fallopian tubes in this arena is markedly different, often based on the idea that the person with Fallopian tubes asking for the permanent option will regret it later on in life, while the person with the penis won't. Paternalistic attitudes in medicine still abound, and they are not always easy to uproot and send away.
Several vengeful men are out to use the power of the courts to get doctors prescribing abortion medication to women in states that prohibit abortions prosecuted, fined, or otherwise driven out of business, but they choose poor avenues, poor reasons, and poor people to prosecute their cases.
The racist intentions of the decision gutting the Voting Rights Act are already providing fruit, as states race to use their power of drawing Congressional districts in ways that will benefit their party, rather than provide anyone the possibility of being represented fairly and accurately.
The green light that the administration has given to racial animus, and its willingness to believe in "reverse racism" and other white-supremacist signals has emboldened others to act accordingly, like a white dermatologist suing a "find a black doctor" directory for discrimination because the white doctor's practice was not germane to the directory's purpose and his application was excluded. Of course, the aggrieved white man cries "discrimination" because he thinks he can get a sympathetic ear and judge to rule in his favor, and if not that, to get a case before the racists at SCOTUS and let them gut civil rights even more.
These are people that have admitted exactly three non-white people under refugee status, pointing out how much they believe in the idea that white people are the most oppressed people in the world.
When we say that John Roberts (and his majority) is an atypically-disciplined racist, I'm borrowing someone else's characterization of him, but also, it's a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the Court that he's been Chief Justice of over the last decade and a half of racist decisions that don't bother trying to make legal arguments for being racist. Callais joins the anti-canon of Court decisions, even as it tries to set up a world in which even Congress cannot tell the Court what its plain intent is and how they are supposed to rule upon matters involving a future law. So the Court should not be surprised if people start ensuring their voices are heard and they are represented in manners outside the political process.
The State Department's annual report on human rights issues around the world is significantly more barebones than it usually is, because the State Department realizes that accusations are highly likely to be confessions, or a proper accounting of human rights abuses would include countries that the current administrator is flirting heavily with.
The Federal Communications Commission put out a proposed rule that would add the existence of a queer person, or queer-positive content, as content that would increase the rating and require disclosure for any program that contained queer people or queer content. Because hatchet-men will swing their axes wherever they can find them, regardless of who gets hurt.
The state of Minnesota prohibited prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket. The federal government sued immediately, saying that prediction markets are exclusively the province of a specific federal agency, and therefore federal preempts state on this. And, of course, they would move swiftly, considering how many people there are with potential insider information they could use to rig a prediction market in favor of their own position. Can't have a state banning the possibility of making oodles of money for yourself, after all. Wouldn't be in line with the priorities of this administration.
Donald Trump ordered Donald Trump to never audit Donald Trump or his family again, and to boot, to give Donald Trump 1.8 billion USD to distribute to his followers and allies who were properly prosecuted for crimes they committed . It's supposedly a "settlement," but if it is, it's a setlement between Donald Trump and Donald Trump, so there's no adversarial parties, a there's no judge in this situation, either. It's all corruption, all the time, in this administration, and they're not really bothering to hide it at this point.
A contractor for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) of the government maintained a public GitHub repository that included sensitive credentials to access the government's Amazon Web Services GovCloud infrastructure and several other projects related to CISA at a high level of authority. You always have to be careful about leaking your secrets when you publish to repositories, and it looks like the person who published the thing explicitly disabled the options that prevent someone from publish those kinds of secrets accidentally, so they exposed keys, and had a plaintext file of usernames and passwords, and several other things that indicate poor security practice by the contractor. (And that some of the credentials for internal networks at CISA weren't very secure, either.) Considering how much CISA was targeted by the Elon Musk techbro crowd, and had their funding and staffing cut, this is the kind of thing that results.
A Nevada energy supplier to a California buyer has said they're going to stop supplying power to the California buyer, but they don't come out and say explicitly that they're stopping the power because a data center will pay them much more money for the power than those boring ol' California residents.
Data centers are also actively contributing to climate change and warming because they have to vent their waste heat somewhere.
The state of Delaware has provided the ultimate answer to the Citizens United Supreme Court case that declared corporations were people, by declaring that there have been no violations of the state constitution by any of the towns that allow corporations and other artificial entities to vote in their local elections, saying that since those entities own property and pay taxes, they should be allowed to have a say in who represents them in government.
There is some good news: the spurious charges filed against Kilmar Abrego Garcia have been dismissed with prejudice, based on the clear vindictiveness in which the federal government filed the charges. Because Mr. Abrego Garcia successfully sued the government based on his wrongful deportation to El Salvador, the Attorney General filed new charges, and made public statements about Mr. Abrego Garcia that made it clear he was doing this not out of justice, but out of revenge.
Tulsi Gabbard is out as Director of National Intelligence, which means, at the moment, there's one less henchperson doing the administrator's dirty work without pushing back at him about what a bad idea it is.
A 117-page ruling from a District Court in Kansas that finds the state's ban on gender-affirming care violates the Kansas State Constitution, and takes care to eviscerate the poor quality of the State's experts, respect the testimony of the people involved, and indicate the high quality of the scientific consensus affirming that gender-affirming care is helpful to minors who receive it. Because he was so thoroughly embarrassed by this ruling, the state's Attorney General promises to appeal the ruling, but with the amount of time and care taken in this takedown, I would be surprised if the appeals court or the state Supreme Court ruled differently than the district court has. ("Judicial activism!" they cry when it goes against them, not choosing to acknowledge that it is also judicial activism when they are ruled for.)
One of the previous CEOs of Google was booed at a commencement speech for being an AI shill, following on from the previous booing of an AI shill at the University of Central Florida. And he deserved every bit of it.
The Starbucks corporation has launched an investigation into how their South Korean arm managed to put through a promotional idea celebrating a military dictatorship in the country, and a time where the dictatorship fired upon protestors and otherwise hurt the people. The outcry about the promotion was swift and destructive, and so once word reached corporate HQ that this had happened, they acted swiftly to dismiss the person responsible and to apologize for the promotion. I wouldn't be surprised if the thought was for brand protection first, and then any other matters will be secondary to that, but they'll have enough time to put together an official reason why they shut down this kind of promotion that will seem much less self-serving and crass.
Misinformation abounds regarding perimenopause and menopause, including things around the need for contraception, or the need for hormone replacement theory, and so many other things, since this particular facet of life is often not talked about or studied in very direct manners.
The government should care more about bees, but the USDA is closing a laboratory just outside the Washington D.C. Beltway. Because they're not thinking about all the things that it is important for government to do, but instead about playing at war and looting the Treasury for their own enrichment.
In technology, Anthropic wants you to believe its AI will behave in moral ways, so it sought input about how to give it rules, first from Christian denominations, then, when reminded that not everyone is a Christian, nor wants to be governed by one, then met with other faith leaders with the same hopes and questions, none of which will be useful to them in terms of trying to get their random chance machine to behave in ways that are not random. But it makes them look like they're trying to work on the problem of morals and ethics in the use of their random chat machines. They've managed to get even Da Pope involved in this project, by positioning themselves as present and interested in the papal encyclical about avoiding technology and algorithms to conduct warfare and criticizing increases in spending for those purposes.
Perhaps more importantly and interestingly, a Stanford student, Myra Cheng, ran a study on the use of LLMs and found that they are generally sycophantic, that sycophancy continues, even when the prompts are about unethical, illegal, and harmful behaviors, and that the sycophancy makes people like and trust the LLM responses more than those of a human, even though the human is much more likely to give better advice in most of those situations. Or needed reality checks. So, if you need another reason to forswear the LLM, it's that it's buttering you up instead of giving you the straight talk.
An awful lot of medics are recording sessions and using algorithms to transcribe and take notes on them, including talk therapy people, which for some people is a big creep-out, because while the provider may assure you that everything is handled properly, it only takes one data breach to expose that idea as a lie, and a data breach doesn't necessarily mean the person was lying to you beforehand. But, once it's out of your control, there's a lot that could happen to it, and people who want human therapy often don't like the idea of confessing to a computer.The supposed benefits to the therapist are being able to handle a higher client load without falling behind on necessary documentation, but that's a symptom of the fact that to make a living, corporations demand that therapists have a classroom's worth of clients. You could, instead, have more therapists and make things easier for everyone. But that's not maximally profitable.
But if you were hoping to use an LLM to spice up your love life, or to indulge in a little erotica, no, the LLM can't be sexy, either, because there are too many fraught issues around what it will or won't do, and what happens to the things that people put into it. The person who created ELIZA recognized this, and worried about what people would tell an unsophisticated program, even though they knew it was a program. With the LLMs, of course, their repeated ability to do things that they have supposedly been banned from doing in their models makes them a risky play partner.
Viral trends on social media aren't necessarily organically viral. The clips are real, but the accounts posting them are getting paid to do it. Because if you're going to make it all the way to being a viral hit, you have to apparently grease the track sufficiently to go fast.
The Wikimedia Foundation appears to be moving in the direction of being terrible capitalist techbros instead of stewards of the Wiki and friends to the unionizing workers.
The Roku OS for most Roku devices has given over half of its screen real estate to a permanent advertisement. Because that monetization isn't going to do itself. And is yet again, another good reason to get devices with operating systems not controlled by media companies, because the ads are always going to be there. Of course, the other problem is that without some add-ons and some interesting, possibly dangerous, decisions, most services don't have a good way of integrating with something like Kodi. And in a world where fewer entities ever produce a file that you can download, it becomes even more fraught to want to own your media and play it on your terms.
The free pinball table, 3D Space Cadet, included in several versions of the Windows operating system is being built as a physical machine, and the person trying to build it is finding that translating the digital to the physical is fraught will all kinds of issues.
Last out, someone has compiled together operating systems across the decades and tweaked them so they run properly in emulation, as a museum and a way of allowing people to access older OSes and play in them. The full edition is about 174 GB uncompressed, the lite one a mere 21 GB uncompressed and will need to download anything not initially included. This is a good reason to fire up your BitTorrent client for both downloading and seeding, because holy shorts, that's a lot of OSes to look through.
A plea not to remove the thing that makes science work by trying to produce automation and non-human scientific pipelines to get faster results. Just so - new knowledge does not always come from rearranging old knowledge, but from the breakthroughs and evolutionary paths and inefficiencies that come from exploration.
Server Charms, a self-contained small network with a few HTML pages that runs on an ESP32 powered by recycled vape batteries. Which is about small and local networks, and hiding a server in plain sight, or in an art project. Reminds me of PirateBox and its insistence on creating a local network for file-sharing and chatting and other such things, albeit on slightly more power-hungry hardware for slightly more power-hungry applications. The idea of small things, very local, very low-powered, and not connected to the greater Internet, still appeals, although there's always the difficulty that connecting to unknown WiFi networks is not encouraged. If there were some way to help satiate the curiosity, and also potentially be a viable local network, that would be something interesting. I feel like this is the sort of thing that a student might use to generate a network away from prying eyes. Or anyone else who would like a small and local enclave they can use away from surveillance and with community at its heart. (Which would work very well with things like PirateBox.)
(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.)
