Flutterby™! From 2023-03-01 to 2023-03-31

RT Thomas@laserdisc.party 90 Minutes Is Normal & Healthy @Thomas@laserdisc.party

In many ways my Mastodon friends are like Pokémon because it means “pocket monsters” and you all know what you did.

[ related topics: Health ]

Julia Evans has some notes about using the 'nix' package manager MacOS package manager. I know at some point this long in the tooth MacBook Pro is gonna be replaced with something that'll need reprovisioning, and package management on the Mac is such a disaster I'm gonna have to look carefully at nix vs homebrew vs whatever else.

[ related topics: Weblogs Macintosh ]

New Study Confirms Extremely Low Regret Rates for Gender-Affirming Surgery

This study validates the results of previous research on regret rates. For instance, a 2022 Lancet study done in the Netherlands found that 98% of trans youth who went through gender-affirming healthcare continue their treatment into adulthood.

The 0.3% regret rate of our newest study is much smaller compared to other, common yet serious surgeries. Interestingly, knee replacement surgery has a dissatisfactory rate of 6-30%. The rate is up to 100 times that of gender-affirming surgery. However, knee replacement surgery does not go through the same scrutiny as trans healthcare does.

“Regret after Gender Affirming Surgery – A Multidisciplinary Approach to a Multifaceted Patient Experience” DOI: 10.1097/PRS.0000000000010243

Via

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design ]

IEEE Xplore: Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models.

Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. Delegation of learning has clear benefits, and at the same time raises serious concerns of trust. This work studies possible abuses of power by untrusted learners. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Machinery Trains Education Gardening ]

Linking to Washington Post: Tech’s hottest new job: AI whisperer. No coding required. for this Simon Willison quote:

“There are people who belittle prompt engineers, saying, ‘Oh, Lord, you can get paid for typing things into a box,’” Willison added. “But these things lie to you. They mislead you. They pull you down false paths to waste time on things that don’t work. You’re casting spells — and, like in fictional magic, nobody understands how the spells work and, if you mispronounce them, demons come to eat you.”

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Food Software Engineering Work, productivity and environment Heinlein Artificial Intelligence Clowns ]

Just more reminder that a lot of income is what you manage to create regulatory capture to siphon off: The pay gap between hospital CEOs and nurses is expanding even faster than we thought

Some hospital CEOs quadrupled their salaries in a few years while nurses’ pay largely stayed stagnant.

North Carolina State Health Plan For Teachers & State Employees — Groundbreaking Report Concludes Nonprofit Hospitals Paid Top Executives More Than $1.75 Billion Over the Past Decade, Doubling CEO Compensation Faster than Previously Believed

[ related topics: Children and growing up Health History Work, productivity and environment ]

Ugh. Why do companies want to do voice call sales and service? Why? What possible value is there to having synchronous communications and not having a written trail?

RT ldodds Leigh Dodds @ldodds@mastodon.me.uk

"An iLLMinated Manuscript is an AI prepared document whose text is supplemented with falsehoods such as bullshit, misinformation and imaginary citations. Often used by Rolling Content Factories for astroturfing and click mining the practice continued well into the 21st century..."</bockquote>

#AI #WikipediaFutureEntries

[ related topics: Artificial Intelligence ]

I bought my desktop Linux machine years ago (like 2016, maybe?) with excess RAM because I knew I was gonna be doing Chrome and Zoom on it. It's been under-serving as a home server since my current gig. But I decided to point OpenAI's "Whisper" at my video archives, and now we're seeing stuff...

(Image is of "top" showing "whisper" taking ~400% of CPU and ~10G of RAM)

[ related topics: Free Software Photography Open Source Video Archival ]

Dear T-Mobile: Why my phone no ring? I have sound turned on? My phone is telling me I have bars. I get the notification that the caller left a message...

[ related topics: tolkien ]

New York Magazine: You Are Not a Parrot And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this.

I've been thinking a lot recently about how once LLMs hit the scene I stopped seeing "content farming" everywhere and started seeing ChatGPT everywhere, and how I'm now not sure as I'm wading through the dreck that Google returns if it's humans or compute polluting the infosphere.

And how the corollary to this is that quite a bit of humanity and human endeavor can be replaced by a couple of GPUs stuffed into a computer, and how our bar for "intelligent" is actually pretty low.

I'm still pondering those thoughts, and now I need to go back and really read Bender's Climbing towards NLU, because my history of interacting with humans means that the octopus thought experiment doesn't rule out an awful lot of human behavior, but lots of good stuff in this article.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Artificial Intelligence Birds New York ]

Wheat Comics: Use the dark web

Which reminds me, I need to do some CSS work on this site...

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Comics ]

Safeway completely missing the boat. Not only can I not tell if my local store carries these, "scan here for more information" on a web site.

Also the offer of a Target gift card further down the site. Is the penny you get from that ad really worth reminding me that your competitor is closer?

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Boats Machinery Currency ]

We have a mixed marriage. I have my dad's S gauge American Flyer, Charlene has her dad's O27 Lionel. Here's comes with smoke pellets and it freaked me out when I turned it on and it started smoking.

[ related topics: Drugs Photography Sociology Trains Marriage ]

A few years and a half off, but I found this interesting: Happy 200th birthday to Eunice Foote, hidden climate science pioneer

Foote’s experiments in the 1850s demonstrated the ability of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide to affect solar heating, foreshadowing John Tyndall’s later experiments that described the workings of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Despite her remarkable insight into the influence that higher carbon dioxide levels in the past would have had on Earth’s temperature, Foote went unnoticed in the history of climate science until recently.

[ related topics: History Current Events Photovoltaics Global Warming ]

I love that we're using the acronym "Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences", because it lets us move from asking "is this SALAMI human?" to "could this human be SALAMI?"

With the right application of Penicillium, probably.

[ related topics: Education ]

I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet

BRB, off to write a Perl script to unzip a .ods file and extract the spreadsheet data with regexes to import it into PostgreSQL.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs Perl Open Source Databases hubris ]

BirdNET-Pi, packages for your Raspberry Pi to record audio, match it up against a local database of songbird chirps, peeps, and songs, and log recorded birds for you.

[ related topics: Music Birds Databases ]

Definitely something current gig needs to be addressing in our materials: RT ★ Amy Star ★ @AmyZenunim@unstable.systems

app company: "We're announcing the our new Suite! It uses the cloud, and all of the tools are accessed through your browser!"

me: "what happens to everything I make with your app if you go out of business"

app:

me:

app:

app: "Subscribe now for only $9.99 a month!"

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Invention and Design Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

I'm seeing a lot of "but why does Picard need to specify 'hot'?". Lemme introduce y'all to my super snazzy electric kettle that not only has a whole bunch of different temperature settings, but will occasionally reset the default to the tepid (160�F) setting. So, yeah, part of turning it on is to *always* setting the temperature back to to max.

[ related topics: Star Trek ]

Reading some product evangelists on the socials media and realizing that "understanding why it looks broken to me" is kind-of a curmudgeonly feature request, and not as sexy as "look at this new awesome!", but...

...yeah, as I'm fighting issues like caret and highlight colors, or why the display of the DOM isn't updating until something apparently unrelated kicks it, this is my lot.

[ related topics: Invention and Design Journalism and Media ]

I've had work reasons to look at Flutterby.com's RSS feeds recently, and it's clear I need to revamp things, but I'm trying to figure out where to put the plain text, where to put the HTML encoded versions, and so forth.

I'm also using the Perl XML::RSS module, which may need to change.

Anyone got suggestions on a good one-pager about modern RSS in practice? I probably literally haven't mucked with this code in two decades.

[ related topics: Web development Content Management Perl Open Source Work, productivity and environment Cryptography hubris ]

Hmmm... I dunno what private equity firm is bleeding Endless Pools dry, but I think I'm gonna take a deep breath and order replacement parts from a third party supplier, 'cause holy crap they're dropping the ball.

Shot: 2016: Feds Pull Millions in Funding for Tree Thinning in East Bay Hills

But Dan Grassetti, president of the Hills Conservation Network, which sued FEMA last year to stop the tree-cutting plan, said he is satisfied with FEMA’s decision. For years, he and his group have argued against clearing forested land, which he contends increases fire danger by allowing sunlight to hit the ground and prompt the growth of low-lying shrubbery. Grassetti argues that the best way to reduce a landscape’s fire risk is to clear that low-lying fuel layer while leaving most of the large trees standing.

Chaser: 2021: The shrubs across the street nearly cost him his home insurance

At the end of August, wildfire prevention advocate Dan Grassetti opened a letter from Allstate, his home’s insurer, with some alarming (and just a little ironic) news. His policy wouldn’t be renewed because of a fire hazard.

The surprising part: The hazard wasn’t on his property but in the lot across the street.

Via

[ related topics: broadband Nature and environment Bay Area Current Events California Culture Pyrotechnics Real Estate ]

I'm gonna miss the Bodega Bay Wooden Boat Challenge for CALLERLAB this year, which means that if you've got mad kataba skillz and are in good enough shape that ripping 64' of 3/8" plywood under time pressure seems doable, there's a team that'd probably like to have you.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama California Culture Boats Machinery ]

When people ask why California's got political problems: the central valley....

'Calling 911 on stars': California sheriff asks residents to stop reporting planets in sky

https://www.ktvu.com/news/call...to-stop-reporting-planets-in-sky

[ related topics: Politics moron Current Events California Culture ]

After Dark screensavers recreated in CSS.

The project has definitely gone into the weeds when I'm cutting my own keyhole plates out of some scrap 3/16" mild steel...

[ related topics: Photography Cool Science ]

And that moment during some dry fitting where I realize just how accurate some of the plastic glue up is gonna have to be...

It all fits, but I've got a few glue sessions (and some carving) that are gonna have to be flawless...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Google voice recorder has... commentary... about the upper regions of my warm up arpeggios...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Skeleton Claw comics nicely summarizes Chrome incognito mode

Via JWZ, by way of JWZ

[ related topics: Weblogs Comics ]

Really enjoying the Vagina Museum's thread on the where "Hamantaschen" might have come from, puts my Oma's Purim baking in a new light. https://masto.ai/@vagina_museum/109978247455975811

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Invention and Design Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Do not point your cloud cameras at anything you don't want made public: The privacy loophole in your doorbell

They [Hamilton Ohio police] asked for more footage, now from the entire day’s worth of records. And a week later, Larkin received a notice from Ring itself: The company had received a warrant, signed by a local judge. The notice informed him it was obligated to send footage from more than 20 cameras — whether or not Larkin was willing to share it himself.

Many of those cameras were at his business, at a completely different location, some of them were inside his home, with no visibility of the places being investigated.

[ related topics: Photography Privacy tolkien Law Current Events Law Enforcement ]

Kinda passingly wonder if Jorn Barger has an opinion on the current flock of large language models.

(And in poking around I find that in the machine learning community, "SALAMI" has a number of competing meanings. sigh.)

[ related topics: Jorn Barger Interactive Drama Community Education ]

Texas denied abortions to these women when their lives were in danger. Now they’re suing the state.

Edit: Washington Post: Details in a lawsuit against Texas’s abortion ban shock the conscience

[ related topics: Sexual Culture ]

Cyclist Makes Helmet Footage Look Like a Dash Cam to Trick Drivers Into Caring

The experiment proves that people take road safety way more seriously when it's presented from the perspective of a car driver, rather than a bicycle rider.

I'm actually shocked by how much my perspective changed by seeing a dashboard overlaid over this riding footage.

[ related topics: Cameron Barrett Photography Automobiles Pedal Power Bicycling ]

Alabama 5th Grade Girls Basketball Team Denied Title After Beating Boys' Team, Sparks Outrage

[ related topics: Sports ]

The Lie Behind Amazon’s HQ2 Sweepstakes Becomes Clear

With the company pausing construction on its ‘second headquarters’ in Virginia, we can see the HQ2 bidding war for what it was: a mass intelligence-gathering operation.

[ related topics: Books History Machinery Fabrication Model Building ]

U.S. Web Design System (USWDS) collection of icons.

[ related topics: Graphic Design ]

Pluralistic: VW wouldn't locate kidnapped child because his mother didn't pay for find-my-car subscription. My sister had similar issues when her truck was stolen, but there's a deeper thing here: VW is selling that location data for marketing purposes.

And, of course, online therapy company Better Help was selling patient data to marketers, specifically “used and revealed consumers’ email addresses, IP addresses, and health questionnaire information to Facebook, Snapchat, Criteo, and Pinterest for advertising purposes.”

The FTC also says that the company gave customer service agents false scripts to try and reassure users that it wasn’t sharing personally identifiable or personal health information after a February 2020 report from Jezebel exposed some of its practices. The commission’s complaint accuses the company of misleading customers by putting a HIPAA seal on its website, despite the fact that “no government agency or other third party reviewed [BetterHelp]’s information practices for compliance with HIPAA, let alone determined that the practices met the requirements of HIPAA.”

And Weight Watchers just acquired Sequence, a telehealth company that prescribes weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Trulicity online

[ related topics: Drugs Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health Bioinformatics Current Events Consumerism and advertising Automobiles Marketing Machinery ]

The Other Square Wave is an interesting fairly short YouTube video, and I thought it was gonna be stuff I already knew about how you can recreate square waves with sine waves, but this went into how rotating the wave generator can create sounds that are the same, even the same volume, but that will behave very differently if you clip them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Mathematics Video ]

Just to make sure I have some of these references... everyone reading this has probably seen this, but.... Haraldur Þorleifsson is from Iceland, started the design firm Ueno. He has a muscular atrophy disorder. mbl.i s readers chose him "person of the year" for 2022, and apparently he's very known for his charitable work in Iceland. He sold Ueno to Twitter in an acqui-hire deal.

A few weeks ago, Twitter had a round of layoffs, his work computer stopped working, but HR wouldn't confirm that he got laid off. He tweeted about this. The exchanges became a public conversation with Elon Musk.

Decent summary: Phony Stark Picks on the Wrong Guy, Attempting (and of Course Botching) an HR Exit Interview Live on Twitter.

Edit: A TikTok from Alex Pearlman tying the demise of Circuit City, and the amazing number of people who suddenly had a position there on their resume, to the current demise of Twitter.

[ related topics: Theater & Plays Sociology Current Events Work, productivity and environment California Culture Graphic Design ]

How much should it cost to use an NYC street? A bill on outdoor dining is set to decide.

“A car can park in a space maybe for a few hours, but we're talking about keeping somebody actually employed,” said Susannah Koteen, who owns three restaurants in Harlem. “If I can have this restaurant full and my outdoor dining full on a weekend, that's an additional server, a busser and a person in the kitchen. Those are jobs.”

Fascinating to have the discussions about the best use of public property like this, especially acknowledging that parking is definitively not the best use....

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Space & Astronomy Current Events Automobiles ]

Over on the Fediverse, Julia Evans @b0rk@jvns.ca has been asking some fascinating questions on things that I've long taken for granted. This morning it was about endian-ness, but the last one was "why is a byte 8 bits?"

She lays out a bunch of reasons in Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes.

Thinking about these has me questioning a lot of my base assumptions. I mean, sure, little-endian makes a lot of sense if you're going to add, potentially set a carry bit, increment an index, add with carry, but in a world pre-ordered cache, does it really matter if that index is being incremented or decremented?

When she asks "Was the motivation mostly that people didn't want their machines to pay the cost of byte order conversion?", I mean, yeah, when memory was that limited swapping around 2 or 4 bytes was expensive, but also....?

And the fact that it's hard to search for a term for a thing when that term hadn't yet made it into the lexicon...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

Bunnie's Blog: Infra-Red, In Situ (IRIS) Inspection of Silicon. As supply chains get harder and harder to monitor, and it's more difficult to tell if the chips you think you bought are actually the chips that got delivered, it's interesting to see the arms race for trying to inspect inside the chips. Compounded by the desire to make it harder to see inside the chips in order to protect DRM keys...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs ]

RT Rich Mintz @richmintz@masto.ai

A driver leaning on a horn or invading an occupied crosswalk is qualitatively different from a man yelling and waving an umbrella. Umbrellas are sharp, but most umbrellas, even in the hands of an angry person, are not weapons. But every car is a weapon when the engine is on.

[ related topics: Music Automobiles Machinery Guns Artificial Intelligence ]

We like to say that the US is a developing nation. That some day we'll have real government services, like developed nations do. Public transit, healthcare, quality of life...

But some days it feels like we've just got too much corruption to overcome.

New cost estimate for high-speed rail puts California bullet train $100 billion in the red. There are all the skyrocketing costs, but

And possibly more worrisome is a cut to the projected future ridership by 25%, owing to the reality that the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally reduced the use of public transportation and California’s expected population growth has fizzled. An important justification for the bullet train since its inception was an expectation that population growth would necessitate improved passenger rail. The report nonetheless asserts the system would perform comparable to Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor passenger loads.

[ related topics: Invention and Design moron California Culture Machinery Trains Public Transportation ]

Kids these days with their printfs and their couts, when I was a lad we 20 ED FD'd, and we liked it.

[ related topics: Nostalgia Children and growing up ]

Know Before You Grow tonight was a great conversation with Riley Weissenborn, a Project Manager with MidPen Housing, and Jocelyn Lin, the Associate Director of Housing Development at Burbank Housing, about building affordable housing in California generally and Sonoma County in particular.

https://youtu.be/RoMrCr20lJc

[ related topics: California Culture Real Estate ]

Having discussions about US foreign policy with someone who wants to let China take Taiwan, so I asked Google "where is samsung's 3nm foundry located", and it keeps giving me where TSMC's foundry is.

At least I can tell from the result text that the language model has failed. In this case. And because I was paying attention.

[ related topics: Photography Law ]

Kudos to the brave residents who stepped up and saved this person's life: Capitol Hill Seattle Blog: Video shows East Precinct officers back down after bystanders step in over heavy response to Capitol Hill ‘shots fired’ 911 calls

YouTube video, Via.

[ related topics: Weblogs Movies Television Video Seattle hubris ]

I dropped Signal from my phone when they decided that they were gonna make me decide how to contact my contacts, and drop SMS from their client. There were some other things that were giving me off vibes, and I have had some second thoughts, because I think end-to-end encryption is important, but mostly I haven't looked back.

More in the off-vibes: Ploum: Losing Signal. On trying, and failing, to get Signal working on an Android phone that doesn't have the Google Play store installed.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment Cryptography ]

It has been [too few] days since XCode changes broke the automated build, again.

It has also been [too few] days since XCode got super confused about 'Counterparts', or exhibited other bizarre editing behavior.

RT Vagina Museum @vagina_museum@masto.ai

On this day in 1892, author Vita Sackville-West was born. She was very close friends with author Virginia Woolf, striking up a lovely, chaste friendship in 1925, which we're going to share wholesome facts about...

Just kidding. They were lovers. Here's the lowdown on the queer relationship between the pair.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Art & Culture Artificial Intelligence ]

Journal of Transportation Safety & Security: Normalizing crash risk of partially automated vehicles under sparse data

By correcting for roadway usage differences between the [Tesla] Autopilot and active safety only data, much of the crash reduction seen by vehicles using Autopilot appears to be explained by lower crash rates experienced on freeways. While the raw crash rate shows an average 43% reduction in crash rate for Autopilot compared to active safety only, this improvement is only 10% after controlling for different rates of freeway driving. Correcting for age demographics likewise produced an 11% increase in the estimated crash rate.

https://doi.org/10.1080/19439962.2023.2178566

[ related topics: Television Marketing ]

RT Dan Gillmor @dangillmor@mastodon.social

God this @mmasnick thread -- about willfully dishonest legislators who aim to destroy the Internet -- will make you grind your teeth. https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/109989269570093950

[ related topics: Religion Net Culture Skating ]

Yahoo completely misreading the room. No, my dudes, I'm here for the schadenfreude*. "Sign in to save SIVB" indeed.

Or my sign-in is worth a *lot* more to them than I'm able to monetize myself.

• not really here for the schadenfreude, today's *huge* market cap losses are gonna mean much pain for startups in my area.

Edit: ‘Shell-shocked’: Silicon Valley Bank Shut Down by Regulators, Marking Stunning Downfall

[ related topics: Business Photography Economics ]

Meta (as in Facebook) is building a decentralized, text-based social network.

Many of us are old enough to remember that Facebook Messenger used to use XMPP until they got large enough to dominate the space. (Via)

[ related topics: broadband Space & Astronomy Current Events ]

State of Minnesota Executive Department: Governor Tim Walz: Executive Order 23-03: Protecting and Suppoirting the Rights of Minnesota's LGBTQIA+ Community Members to Seek and Receive Gender Affirming Health Care Services, including directives that there should be "no assistance from state agencies to states seeking to penalize gender affirming healthcare services", and providing "protection against extradition".

Meanwhile, Chattanooga mayor, police unsure how to enforce new restrictions on drag shows as the Tennessee governor and legislature try to drag that state back even further.

Edit: expanding this, Mother Jones: Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country and an Google Sheets index of the Rep. Peter Deutsch emails maintained @marnanel@queer.party.

[ related topics: Health Invention and Design Current Events Law Enforcement Television Civil Liberties Chattanooga Community ]

Guardian: BBC will not broadcast Attenborough episode over fear of rightwing backlash — Exclusive: Decision to make episode about natural destruction available only on iPlayer angers programme-makers

The BBC has decided not to broadcast an episode of David Attenborough’s flagship new series on British wildlife because of fears its themes of the destruction of nature would risk a backlash from Tory politicians and the rightwing press, the Guardian has been told.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Invention and Design Journalism and Media Monty Python ]

Microsoft Released an AI That Answers Medical Questions, But It’s Wildly Inaccurate

Asked about the average number of ghosts haunting an American hospital, for example, it cited nonexistent data from the American Hospital Association that it said showed the "average number of ghosts per hospital was 1.4." Asked how ghosts affect the length of hospitalization, the AI replied that patients "who see the ghosts of their relatives have worse outcomes while those who see unrelated ghosts do not."

To be fair to Microsoft, this may actually be better than the answers an average physician gives....

[ related topics: Humor Microsoft moron Artificial Intelligence ]

Whoah: just realized that the value of ChatGPT and other SALAMIs is inserting all of that bullshit into transactions that neurotypical people need.

This message inspired by http://scripting.com/publicfol...use-listing-renovated-ranch.html

Seeing news of a number of local large fenatanyl busts, which means all of those fentanyl billboards along the 101 corridor must really be driving up demand. Good job, fentanyl awareness campaigners!

[ related topics: Current Events Heinlein ]

Samsung "space zoom" moon shots are fake, and here is the proof. The commenter takes a 170x170 picture of the moon with gaussian blur, takes a picture of it off of is monitor with a Samsung S22 Ultra, gets a picture with quite a bit of detail that couldn't exist in the original.

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

Re that "the only thing that will stop a bad guy in a dress is a good guy in a dress" meme, yeah, we know that, but when it's on a bad guy it's called "vestments".

Support your drag queens, they're keeping us safer.

[ related topics: Marketing ]

I don't know what made Facebook's advertising algorithm think that I needed lots of ProTec and Rollerblade and similar ads in my feed, but it's definitely a reminder that there are injuries I should probably get out of my system while I'm still young.

[ related topics: Consumerism and advertising Skating ]

The only Oscars I'll bother watching sing "I love trash".

Next time I buy bamboo toilet paper I'm gonna see if they sell it in anything softer than 60 or 100 grit.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

What the fuck is this Gmail Chat overreach that's confusing my share options on my Android phone? Like "we're not content with destroying the email ecosystem, now we have to further splinter the messaging space and make communication even more confusing".

[ related topics: Space & Astronomy ]

RT ds @ds@wetdry.world

I'm non-binary which means I have to compile my gender from source

Now thinking about interpreted gender, and dynamically linked gender.

Mast0odon thread of hard-boiled detective fiction "but with lesbians"

Diversity is not a trope aka The Lesbians with Swords List

[ related topics: Weblogs Current Events ]

Ryan Houlihan 🐙 @ryanhoulihan@mastodon.social

I never thought I would resent young people but the sexual puritanism I overhear from people in their teens and early twenties is genuinely disturbing. I feel like sometimes we resolve some problems to the degree that people raised amongst those solutions get really curious about how bad those problems were combined with nostalgia for the aesthetic of the problems. The Hays code was bad. Can they just watch a single documentary about AIDS please

[ related topics: Erotic Sexual Culture Movies ]

Forbes: Motorists Break Law To Save Time, Cyclists Break Law To Save Lives, Finds Study

Reported on JSTOR Daily on August 28, a study initially carried in the Journal of Transport and Land Use stated that “nearly everyone has ... rolled through a stop sign or driven a few miles per hour over the speed limit” but that these infractions are considered “normal and even rational.”

However, bicyclists breaking the law attracts a “higher level of scorn and scrutiny,” says the U.S study by university researchers Wesley E. Marshall, Daniel Piatkowski, and Aaron Johnson.

Via

[ related topics: Education Real Estate ]

RT Potato ENTHUSIAST @Br3nda@cloudisland.nz

Save the recipes you like that you found online because in a matter of months or weeks they will be drowned out by chat gpt generated recipes that looks plausible but don't work, and have taken up the first 20 pages of search results.

[ related topics: Food Work, productivity and environment ]

RT The Corodon @thecorodon@wandering.shop

In serialized storytelling, the "7-year rule" is the idea that, in some genres, you can re-use the same plots every 7 years or so because the audience will have mostly changed in that time. You can see examples of this in silver-age superhero comics, professional wrestling, and the financial sector.

In unrelated news, looks like the FDIC has stepped in to protect depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. Wonder how long it's gonna take to unravel all of the fingerpointing about short-selling and collusion in withdrawals and all of that. I've heard a bunch of accusations thrown around, but...

[ related topics: Current Events Comics ]

RT Dan Ports @dan@discuss.systems

This is your periodic reminder that 10 years ago an audiophile forum started debating which versions of memcpy had the highest sound quality.

And that C++ new sounds better than malloc.

https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/

Of course I'm mucking about with the audio abstraction layer of Qt to migrate Mike Pogue's Mac M series chip mods to SquareDesk (my branch with my "lie to the code about how large the buffers are" code) and trying to tell if the occasional click is something in that stack, or something in Linux on the Surface Pro 3's audio drivers.

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Music Open Source Invention and Design Macintosh Community ]

Autopsy reveals anti-'Cop City' activist's hands were raised when shot and killed

In fiction, a stigmata reference like this would be tossed out as a little too on the nose.

RT Fabian Giesen @rygorous@mastodon.gamedev.place

Wondering "how are we gonna afford these ninth chords" when in fact they don't cost extra: the Funk Cost Fallacy

The "music on an SD card on a Kindle Fire plugged into the ceiling speakers" thing really isn't working for us. I think we want a way to control the house music from our phones. I see Volumio and Plex, but all of those end up with UI that's annoying and is always trying to upsell us to subscription services we don't need.

[ related topics: Music User Interface Work, productivity and environment Pyrotechnics Real Estate ]

Database Cryptography Fur the Rest of Us

But we’re not settling for mere compliance on this blog. Furries have standards, after all.

[ related topics: Privacy Weblogs Cryptography Databases ]

Reading yet another report of student-on-student violence in Sonoma County, and my memory of grade school is that this sort of thing occurred when administrators weren't paying attention to student dynamics.

I remember some friends, who were not from my usual social group, stepping in between me and the guy with a knife, and the school psychologist almost tackling them out of the way because he thought *they* were the threat.

Not saying that's what's happening here, but...

[ related topics: Children and growing up ]

Congressman confronts FBI over “egregious” unlawful search of his personal data

Last month, a declassified FBI report revealed that the bureau had used Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to conduct multiple unlawful searches of a sitting Congress member’s personal communications. Wired was the first to report the abuse, but for weeks, no one knew exactly which lawmaker was targeted by the FBI. That changed this week when Rep. Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) revealed during an annual House Intelligence Committee hearing on world threats that the FBI’s abuse of 702 was “in fact” aimed at him.

“This careless abuse by the FBI is unfortunate,” LaHood said at the hearing, suggesting that the searches of his name not only “degrades trust in FISA” but was a “threat to separation of powers” in the United States. Calling the FBI’s past abuses of Section 702 “egregious,” the congressman—who is leading the House Intelligence Committee's working group pushing to reauthorize Section 702 amid a steeply divided Congress—said that “ironically,” being targeted by the FBI gives him a “unique perspective” on “what’s wrong with the FBI.”

Demand Progress: FBI Unlawfully Used Congressman’s Name to Fish Through Warrantlessly Surveilled Communications

Brennan Center for Justice: Coalition Document Proposes Reforms to Section 702.

Via /.

[ related topics: Politics Movies History Work, productivity and environment Law Enforcement Real Estate ]

Whoohoo! My running of OpenAI's Whisper on my back catalog of Newbie Callers and Know Before You Grow Zoom meetings continues, looks like it's doing about one or two meetings per day on this 3.4GHz i7-6700. Just ran `top` and see it chuggin' along at 9.7g resident, 400% CPU.

Almost like having a Slack tab open in Chrome...

[ related topics: Sports ]

Friend on Facebook just posted scoring a 100MHz 32MB 1996 era laptop to use as a heated cat perch, and CPU-wise that's a factor of like 100 (a few GHz times a couple of cores), RAM-wise a factor of a thousand, away from a modern basically usable laptop.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Photography Star Trek Space & Astronomy Aviation - Helicopters ]

At some point I created an account on Restaraunt-Hospitality.com to read an article or something, so I get these email updates about the dining trade. And they're fascinating, so I don't unsubscribe, and sometimes link to cool articles and pictures...

But wow do they give me a look inside the sausage factory that inspires my home cooking rather than leading me to want to go out to dine.

[ related topics: Photography Food ]

That gap between when I provision a new machine and when I get my .emacs.d/init.el file installed on it isn't nearly as awkward as when my wife and I end up with each other's phones: Both Pixel 7s, but each navigating the other's is a lesson in how even minimal UI customization becomes very personal very quickly.

[ related topics: User Interface Invention and Design Graphics Marriage ]

Just finished the ARC of Melissa Geissinger's "Nothing Left But Dust". Read it in two sittings. Melissa is getting her legs as a novelist, I have a few critiques, but... I devoured it in two sittings, rarely flipping away from the ebook reader on my tablet, and really enjoyed a historical look at the earthquake and fire that's gonna lead me to dive into the resources at the end, and spend some time with a map. And I'll preorder the next one now.

[ related topics: virus Earthquake Pyrotechnics Maps and Mapping ]

Interesting, and yet I'm not totally sure what to make of it: Sony Electronics Launches New Retinal Projection Camera Kit

[ related topics: Photography Invention and Design ]

Oh dear. After having to force quit XCode several times today because of extended beachballing, I rebooted. Apparently the MacBook Pro shitting itself and forgetting the primary login is a known issue and tomorrow I have to try to recover via my Apple ID. If I can recover that password...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama ]

RT small gay energy @finn@surfin.dog

i enjoy black panther but i've always thought the name "killmonger" was a bit daft. deathgrocer. harmpeddler. ouchmerchant.

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Dogs ]

RT Graham Sutherland / Polynomial @gsuberland@chaos.social

OH: @LunaFoxgirlVT "people with ADHD don't have bad object permanence, we just have really good occlusion culling"

Okay, now I really wanna use this language:

Design by contract in Rust

Discussion about numerical constrained types in Rust

Via

[ related topics: Graphic Design Community ]

Dear Firefox, y'all can't render PDFs from MusicNotes worth a damn, and are kinda sketch on a lot of other PDF rendering, and now you want me to let you be the default for filling in forms?

More indication of Mozilla completely misreading the room. Do y'all not use your product?

[ related topics: Photography Open Source Graphics ]

Forced an OS update on my Google Pixel 7 Android phone, because of that Samsung transceiver exploit that's floating around, and I'm pretty sure it took circa 3 hours from me clicking "update" to when it finally asked for permission to restart. Yowza.

[ related topics: Graphics Boats ]

Back in the '90s, I corresponded, and once met up with in person, Marylaine Block. Author of "My Word's Worth", among other things. I lost track of her, and believe she died a few years ago, but I just ended up on Marylaine(dot)com, sent a link to some of her writing, and then discovered that her page has been infected by casino scammers.

Something to think about as we figure out how to do estate planning for our digital assets.

[ related topics: Marylaine Block Writing Gambling ]

I'm starting to see people posting about Ted Lasso S3. So no spoilers, but if Ted's character arc has him actually learning something rather than just smearing platitudes around, tell me, 'cause then I'll be interested.

Or maybe if Nate really rubs his nose in it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Education ]

Sitting here going back through some of the songs we sang at a workshop with Lydia Violet and MaMuse last weekend, and thinking about how nice it would be to have a singing circle here in Petaluma, rather than driving down to Marv Zauderer's events in Marin. I guess the question is if this energy replaces square dance calling in my life, or becomes *another* project...

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Bay Area ]

It's been probably a decade and a half since we've seen a production of Cabaret. Went down to the Marin School of the Arts this evening for their production, and it was really good, and it lands a little different in the 2020s than it did back in the noughties.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Bay Area Theater & Plays Work, productivity and environment Burlesque ]

From yesterday: The Iraq War Began 20 Years Ago Today. Phil Donahue's MSNBC Show Was One Of The First Casualties. A good reminder that the "anti-war kooks" were fucking right.

[ related topics: History ]

RT The Volatile Mermaid @OhNoSheTwitnt@mastodon.social

A holiday where you put blood on your doorpost to prevent the government from killing your reproductive rights called Pussover.

[ related topics: moron Civil Liberties ]

Holy shit, The Atlarntic, @theatlarntic@bird.makeup, is on fire, and dead on. One headline: "It's Totally Unprofessional To Say That Covid Is Spread By Assholes — Sorry, you said aerosols. I don't know anything about that."

[ related topics: Pyrotechnics Birds ]

Reminder that you can turn off stupid web page custom fonts in Firefox bu searching for "Fonts" in settings, going to "Advanced...", and un-checking "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above"

Looks like making Chrome behave sensibly a bookmarklet or extension, though.

[ related topics: Graphic Design hubris ]

Some good ruminations on Michael Knowles, Jesse Singal, Jonathan Chait, and their ilk: They Know Exactly What They're Doing:

<span>Imagine if you will that you watched me gather the following ingredients: </span>1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour; 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder; 1/4 teaspoon salt; 1/2 cup unsalted butter, softened; 1 cup granulated sugar; 2 large eggs; 1 teaspoon vanilla extract; 1/2 cup whole milk.

Imagine now that, once you had seen me gather these ingredients, I set my oven to exactly 350°F (180°C) and begin to grease an 8-inch cake pan with butter or cooking spray—and then, in a medium bowl, whisked together the flour, baking powder, and salt until combined. Furthermore, imagine that, in a separate large bowl, I began to cream the softened butter and sugar together, until it was light and fluffy, using an electric mixer, adding the eggs, one at a time, and beat until each is fully incorporated.

“Ah ha,” hypothetical you hypothetically says. “He is making a lovely cake.”

Now, imagine that when hypothetical me hears this, I get upset with hypothetical you. No, not upset—furious. I accuse you of twisting my actions to suit your narrative of lies and abuse. I threaten a libel suit. How dare you, I ask, suggest that I am making a cake when I haven’t even put the ingredients in a cake tray yet, much less put it in the oven. It is just beyond the </span>pale<span> that you would suggest that I am baking anything, much less a cake. I am, I insist, only curiously experimenting with how ingredients mix—and anyway, it would be impossible to bake cakes, because the idea that cakes are something that exists in the world is a malicious lie; everything that people call “cake” is simple an improperly-shaped muffin.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Movies Food Food - Cake ]

A lot of people have been denigrating ChatGPT for giving answers that read like a content-farm worker was regurgitating the ideas of a coke-addled tech bro, but it turns out that that's actually fairly useful when trying to figure out WTF the design decisions behind aspects of Apple's Cocoa widget set were.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Drugs Graphic Design ]

RT Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life@mas.to

It’s a bad look for the venture capital industry that they panicked and cause SVB to collapse via a bank run, and now no bank wants to take it over and get the VC/startup customer base.

A real own goal.

https://www.reuters.com/busine...te-sale-private-unit-2023-03-20/

Med Page Today: How Overturning Roe v. Wade Changed Match Day 2023

Our recent study<span class="screen-readers-only">opens in a new tab or window</span> published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine begins to answer this question. In a survey of more than 2,000 current and future physicians on social media, we found that most (82.3%) would prefer to work or train in states with preserved abortion access. In fact, more than three-quarters (76.4%) of respondents would not even apply to states with legal consequences for providing abortion care. The same holds true for states with early or complete bans on abortion or Plan B. In other words, many qualified candidates would no longer even consider working or training in more than half of U.S. states.

Journal of Internal Medicine: Practice Location Preferences in Response to State Abortion Restrictions Among Physicians and Trainees on Social Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-023-08096-5

Unrelated to medicine, but I've said I'm going to fulfill duties at the IAGSDC convention in Durham, NC, in the summer of 2024, and if North Carolina has a functional drag ban at that time I'm... not sure what's going to happen. I know I'm thinking about it.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Invention and Design Law Journalism and Media Work, productivity and environment Machinery Trains ]

Because I'll find it here. I've been using drug store razor blades for years, Wilkinson, etc. I ordered a sampler pack from West Coast Shaving, and the first one I opened was a pack of Dorco blades, and wow. Only used one so far, but first shave was smooth without cutting, and it seems to be holding up. If these are consistent, I really like them.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Health California Culture ]

"Disable pop-up blocker" Um. Hello. 2003 called, the want their web information architecture back.

[ related topics: Architecture ]

Not exactly news, and I think there are some deeper questions to be answered here about what occurs long-term, but: Managers Exploit Loyal Workers Over Less Committed Colleagues

Companies want loyal workers, and there is a ton of research showing that loyal workers provide all sorts of positive benefits to companies,” said Matthew Stanley, Ph.D., the lead researcher on the new paper and postdoctoral researcher at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. “But it seems like managers are apt to target them for exploitative practices.”

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology: Loyal workers are selectively and ironically targeted for exploitation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2022.104442

[ related topics: Children and growing up Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Invention and Design Current Events Education Model Building ]

Thinking about how Apple Music feels like preinstalled bloatware and a liability to using MacOS. I mean, sure, you can install a better media player, but if you accidentally trigger Apple Music you then have to disentangle all of the stupid file copying and duplication stuff.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Music Journalism and Media Macintosh hubris ]

I don't know if the issue lies with FedEx or the shipper, but I've got a fairly (physically) large delivery that involves, apparently, 3 pieces. I can't use any of those pieces without all of them (for reasons obvious to the shipper), and yet each is delivered over 3 subsequent days. Seems inefficient.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

I hate XCode.

(Yeah, if I knew more about why it keeps beachballing on me I'd elaborate, but for now that's all I got. Just hate.)

[ related topics: Interactive Drama ]

Apple bit rot may yet force me to an M2. There's no reason this laptop should be out of date, but I suspect that it's Ventura+XCode with the main thread warnings that I can't do anything about because it's all in Apple code that's making this machine unusably slow.

[ related topics: Apple Computer ]

Seeing a lot of things about DPReview shutting down, and I have to stop and think about it every time, because in my timeline "DP" has rarely meant Digital Photography...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Anti-porn bills in 8 states could force device makers to censor sexual material

The bills would require phone and tablet manufacturers like Apple and Samsung to turn on content filters by default, but their reach could be deeper than intended.

"deeper than intended" my ass, the bluenoses always want to impose their religious law universally.

Utah's measure was signed into law in 2021, but it requires five additional states to pass similar laws.

The organizations driving this mentioned in the article are "National Center on Sexual Exploitation", "Protect Young Eyes", "Project STAND".

This, of course, is a good time to remember that pretty much every credible investigation into links between pornography availability and sexual violence show that there's a negative correlation, and this sort bullshit is usually pushed by the sort of predatory cultures that like to keep kids from having the language to describe being abuse, and who believe in the subjugation of women.

[ related topics: Religion Apple Computer Children and growing up Erotic Sexual Culture Free Speech Government ]

RT evacide @evacide@hachyderm.io

I'm not writing an entire blog post about how stupid a US TikTok ban would be because this is all that needs to be said:

If the Chinese government is in your threat model, don’t install TikTok on your device. Otherwise, your actual problem is surveillance capitalism.

And if the US government is in your threat model, for deity's sake don't install anything Meta.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Weblogs moron Writing hubris ]

Seeing questions in various places that indicate that LinkedIn is currently a hotbed of overpayment scams, but the thing is... I wasn't aware that any legitimate employer used LinkedIn to begin with.

[ related topics: Work, productivity and environment ]

Digging through spindump output, and with all of the sleep problems I'm having on Ventura, and some of the weird window redraw issues in tabbing, I'm realizing that MacOS may have a way to go to catch up with Linux in terms of desktop GUI usability, but Apple has far surpassed it in terms of weird inconsistent hardware support and making users be system level programmers.

[ related topics: Free Software Apple Computer Open Source Macintosh ]

The thing about Tax Heaven 3000 — the dating sim that does your taxes is that, sure, it's an obvious scam to siphon your personal information for nefarious purposes (actually, satire about that), but it's not like Intuit's TurboTax is any less of an obvious scam to siphon your PII for evil.

Via

[ related topics: Politics moron Government ]

I couldn't remember William Carlos Williams, so I asked Bard "Write a poem in the style of peaches and icebox describing buttocks." I'm so gonna get banned.

Here is a poem in the style of peaches and icebox describing buttocks:

Buttocks, like peaches,

Round and ripe,

Sweet and juicy,

A sight to behold.

Buttocks, like icebox,

Cold and hard,

Frozen in time,

A sight to endure.

Buttocks, like peaches and icebox,

Both beautiful,

Both desirable,

Both a mystery.

[ related topics: Photography ]

[ related topics: Sociology Video ]

[ related topics: Video ]

Let's Streisand-effect the shit out of this: Guy reviews Spartan Mosquito Eradicator that fails to eradicate mosquitoes, is hit with SLAPP lawsuit, incurs $150k in legal fees.

[ related topics: Law ]

Inspired by https://mstdn.social/@spaf/110074625119781526 , I decided to use @spaf@mstdn.social's prompt on Bard...

And now I need to figure out how to get my image uploading thing to provide alt text...

[ related topics: Photography ]

Poor Human Olfaction is a Nineteenth Century Myth

Strangely, the idea that humans have tiny olfactory bulbs and a poor sense of smell is derived in part from the religious politics of nineteenth century France. The Catholic Church in France actively fought secularization, including the denunciation of the Paris Faculty of Medicine for teaching “atheism and materialism.” One of the physicians publicly singled out by bishops in the French Senate (5) was prominent neuroanatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca. This conflict manifested even in the day-to-day administration of Broca’s academic institution and jeopardized the operation of his laboratory. Because of this socio-historical milieu, Broca sometimes interpreted his anatomical data to provide empirical support of his reductionist views.

The chain of misinformation is chased through Sigmund Freud (go figure) who continued the myth that smell and cognition were inversely linked. But there's other fascinating bits in here.

doi:10.1126/science.aam7263

[ related topics: Religion Politics ]

Some people will spend billions of dollars developing large language models rather than building APIs which make sense and use consistent language.

The Intercept: The Honey Trap — The FBI Used An Undercover Cop With Pink Hair to Spy on Activists and Manufacture Crimes, trying to entrap housing activists while deliberately pulling resources away from the investigation of the neo-Nazi who shot up the Club Q nightclub in Colorado Springs.

And The Snitch in the Silver Hearse — The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver's Racial Justice Movement.

Afroman sued by law enforcement officers who raided his home

Afroman Facing Lawsuit From Ohio Sheriff’s Deputies for Using Their Likeness to Sell Merch After Home Raid

I did previously link to Afroman - Will You Help Me Repair My Door (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO), with video of the thugs rampaging through his house and eating his lemon pound cake.

[ related topics: Music Movies Law Enforcement Video Gambling Archival Real Estate Food - Cake ]

Your morning dose of batshittery: An Interview With the School Board Chair Who Forced Out a Principal After Michelangelo’s David Was Shown in Class

Local elections are important, folks, get involved in your school board elections, because they sure are.

[ related topics: Children and growing up Furniture ]

Low Cost CO2 Sensors Comparison: Photo-Acoustic vs NDIR

Via

[ related topics: Photography Weblogs Space & Astronomy Global Warming ]

ThumbHash

A very compact representation of an image placeholder. Store it inline with your data and show it while the real image is loading for a smoother loading experience.

[ related topics: Skating ]

If you didn't catch up on US lawmakers exposing themselves as willing to be puppets of Meta PR to embrace Sinophobia rather than looking at privacy protections generally, Emily Gorcenski posted a good summary in meme form, and Markus Hutchins linked to a TikTok summarizing the hearings.

But if you want a more serious deeper dive into US attempts to build a "great wall" style censorship system for the Internet, Bruce Schneier looks at banning TikTok.

And, later, link-dumping: Will Oremus in the Washington Post: America’s online privacy problems are much bigger than TikTok — Concerns of Chinese data access highlight Congress’s own failure to protect Americans’ personal information

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Privacy Weblogs Free Speech Net Culture Marketing Cryptography Archival ]

Fuuuuu. Scientists uncover startling concentrations of pure DDT along seafloor off L.A. coast

These revelations confirm some of the science community’s deepest concerns — and further complicate efforts to understand DDT’s toxic and insidious legacy in California. Public calls for action have intensified since The Times reported in 2020 that dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, banned in 1972, is still haunting the marine environment today. Significant amounts of DDT-related compounds continue to accumulate in California condors and local dolphin populations, and a recent study linked the presence of this once-popular pesticide to an aggressive cancer in sea lions.

University of California Santa Barbara Marine Science Institute — History of DDT Ocean Dumping off L.A. Coast Even Worse than Expected, EPA Finds

After an exhaustive historical investigation into the barrels of DDT waste reportedly dumped decades ago near Catalina Island, federal regulators concluded that the toxic pollution in the deep ocean could be far worse — and far more sweeping — than what scientists anticipated.

In internal memos made public recently, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that acid waste from the nation’s largest manufacturer of DDT — a pesticide so powerful it poisoned birds and fish — had not been contained in hundreds of thousands of sealed barrels.

[ related topics: Nature and environment California Culture Community ]

Oh, Apple. ⌃⇧6 does something different on my external Bluetooth keyboard than on the built-in MacBook Pro keyboard.

Some day MacOS will get peripherals right. Today is not that day. My screen escape sequence has to be typed on the built-in keyboard, I guess.

[ related topics: Apple Computer Wireless Bioinformatics Macintosh ]

RT Shon @gayblackvet

Say you’re in a room with 400 ppl. 36 don’t have health insurance. 48 live in poverty. 85 are illiterate. 90 have untreated mental illnesses. And everyday, at least 1 person is shot. But 2 are trans so you decide ruining their lives is a priority. That is what’s happening rn

Most trans adults say transitioning made them more satisfied with their lives:

Many have been harassed or verbally abused. They’ve been kicked out of their homes, denied health care and accosted in bathrooms. A quarter have been physically attacked, and about 1 in 5 have been fired or lost out on a promotion because of their gender identity. They are more than twice as likely as the population at large to have experienced serious mental health struggles such as depression.

Yet most trans adults say transitioning has made them more satisfied with their lives.

Which may also explain the amazingly low regret rate on surgery: If someone gets to that point, they've gotten past social transitioning, probably been through several years of hormone therapy, legal transitioning, so years of struggle and barriers before surgery even becomes an option.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Sexual Culture Psychology, Psychiatry and Personality Health History Theater & Plays Law Currency ]

RT Buffy the Psych Prof @DrPsyBuffy@mstdn.social

I recently had a man say to me, “I’m sorry I’m not the man you thought I was.” But the reality is that he is not the man *he* thinks he is and therein lies the problem. Many of us are fairly clueless about ourselves because we’ve lived our entire lives being whoever we think we are supposed to be for other people and thus never actually get a chance to find out who we *actually* are. And sometimes that turns out to be a shocking surprise to everyone, including ourselves.

Forbes: The DEA Quietly Turned Apple’s AirTag Into A Surveillance Tool

Probably a good idea to make sure you've got AirGuard or something similar running on your phone. If not the DEA, then someone else...

[ related topics: Apple Computer Interactive Drama Sports ]

Press Watch: “Fact-checking” is a feeble, inadequate way to respond to racist, antisemitic incitement

[ related topics: Movies ]

RT jwz@mastodon.social jwz @jwz@mastodon.social

@th Everything about HDMI makes more sense once you understand it as first a *restraint*, and only second as a means of moving images from point A to point B.

HDMI's mission is, "Under no circumstances display something unpermitted; all other considerations secondary; crew expendable."

The EDID thing probably falls out of that on the basis of: the kind of people who would willingly work on the design of such a system are terrible engineers, technically and ethically compromised.

[ related topics: Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Graphic Design ]

Currently in Tualatin Oregon. Charlene has a get together, so I was gonna find a coffee shop for a few hours, but it's kinda suburbia hell. I feel like that kinda dream where the goal seems almost acceptable and then is suddenly somewhere else for non-sequitur reasons. Anyway, I found this pond and am watching this model boat sailed around it, and that's better than a Starbucks or Pete's in the middle of acres of parking lot.

[ related topics: Photography Boats Machinery ]

Every sign tells a story.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Don't use Google to find software downloads, buy tickets to shows, or trust the info page for answer summaries.

https://arstechnica.com/inform...ing-google-to-download-software/

[ related topics: Software Engineering Television ]

Don't use Google to find software downloads, buy tickets to shows, or trust the info page for answer summaries.

https://arstechnica.com/inform...ing-google-to-download-software/

[ related topics: Software Engineering Television ]

In a world where developers are telling us they can't build residential for less than about $450 per square foot, Know Before You Grow forum attendees keep asking about off-site prefab for multi-family. Anyone got resources to pursue? I keep hearing promises of cheaper and better and all that, but we are still here...

[ related topics: Sociology Community ]

Out of town, and this Surface Pro 3 is not making it as a Linux platform for me. I could buy a Frame.work or whatever, but Charlene has a last of the Intel MacBook Airs. If Linux worked really well on that, I could see buying her an M series chip instead.

But given all of the issues I've had with this Surface Pro 3 and Linux suspend/sleep, I'd want to know that it actually works well. Anyone got experience with that?

[ related topics: Free Software Interactive Drama Open Source Work, productivity and environment ]

Spending a few days staying with a friend in downtown Portland, and I'm realizing just how badly I've been lied to about the suburbs. Sure there's some down sides, and I do have a lot of amenities at my house, and cars suck, but the proximity to shops and amenities is pretty attractive.

[ related topics: Photography Sociology Real Estate ]

Monday out in the Portland suburbs, just taking note of the 6' sidewalks unobstructed by utility furniture. Like we're could actually walk side by side.

[ related topics: Photography ]

Also from Monday in the Portland burbs, a kid on a bike following a parent on a bike. The auto travel lane looked to be 9', maybe 10' wide, with speed bumps to keep auto traffic at a reasonable speed.

[ related topics: Photography Bicycling ]

Guys, I think I've figured out "thought leader". It's that they're so far out ahead of actual thought that the thinking never catches up.

Trump indicted by NY grand jury:

Yusef Salaam, one of the five people exonerated for the Central Park jogger attack decades ago, released a brief statement Thursday about Donald Trump’s reported indictment. After noting that Trump had never apologized for taking out a full-page ad calling for the death penalty against Salaam and his co-defendants, he said: “Karma.”

[ related topics: Politics ]

All up and down the 101 corridor I've seen these billboards for Fentanyl. I mean, I suppose they're "awareness" campaign or something, but they make it seem pretty attractive, especially to their target market. I wasn't sure what was going on, but the pieces are starting to fall together:

California police union director charged with importing fentanyl, other opioids

The executive director of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association has been charged with attempting to illegally import a controlled substance, according to the United States Department of Justice.

Joanne Marian Segovia, 64, is accused of ordering thousands of opioids to her home and agreeing to distribute them in the United States.

[ related topics: Bay Area Sociology Current Events Journalism and Media Law Enforcement California Culture Economics ]

I'm currently running a Surface Pro 3 with Debian, and it kinda sucks. I mean, Debian is fine, but nothing I've done gets the Surface sleeping and waking reliably, and I need to figure out a solution to using this thing on my lap.

Anyway, part of the path there involved installing a bunch of different distributions, and even XUbuntu is starting to feel a little icky, with Snaps and such.

I'm considering splurging on a Framework laptop, but also considering that at some point I'll ask work for an updated MacBook, and I'm not doing a lot these days that needs Linux, even though I far prefer that environment.

Anyway, some notes on switching to Red Hat Fedora from Ubuntu

[ related topics: Free Software Open Source Nature and environment Work, productivity and environment Sports ]

When we got back from our trip, Charlene and I went for brain-dead comedy. We still have a Hulu subscription, so we turned in Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part II.

I just can't keep up with the mainstream culture. I made a concerted effort for a while, but it's clear that this was playing against a lot of popular culture (Jackass, Kardashians?) that I have never seen, and so was missing enough of the jokes that it just wasn't landing for me.

[ related topics: Aviation Sociology California Culture Travel ]