A guy on Facebook reported one of my #COVID19 posts as misinformation, saying that masks have been proven to be ineffective at preventing infections. If you are laboring under the same delusion:
Masks are, if correctly and consistently worn, effective in reducing transmission of respiratory diseases and show a dose-response effect. - Recent research study https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/cmr.00124-23
Making #penplotter progress. I had to stop it while it was making the title text because it was doing this weird thing where it kept lifting and dropping the pen making the curves, but all the other line work and text came out great!
What a fantastic way to describe gas vs #solar electric for transportation.
βIf you grow an acre of corn, it will produce 900 gallons of ethanol, which will get you about 25,000 miles for a Ford F-150 pickup,β says Carson. βWhich is, not bad I guess. But letβs say we put solar on that same acre. It will produce enough electricity every year to drive my Lightning 550,000 miles.β
βthe key to a longer, healthier life is no mysteryβ. Research has long shown that it comes down to five fundamental lifestyle behaviours: exercising regularly, eating sensibly, limiting alcohol, skipping cigarettes and βnurturing meaningful relationshipsβ. This stuff is simple, βsomewhat boringβ and, crucially, harder to make money from than βtrendy supplements, complex-sounding theories and new gadgetsβ.
So I just watched #TVNZ news go from a report on Trump shooting, concluding there's no place for political violence in US, to a story about Israel killing more than 90 innocent #Palestinian civilians sheltering in a designated 'safe zone' in an attack allegedly targeting 2 Hamas military leaders. I hope #NZMedia isn't blind to their blatant political hypocrisy. #NZPol
I'm really really really not interested in computers getting more powerful. I am super interested in them being more repairable and modifiable, drawing less power, lasting and being supported for way longer etc. That stuff still gets me excited
the whole country's gonna get soooo many lectures about "political violence" from the people who think all of society will crumble if the cops don't beat the shit out of black teens and homeless people every day of the week
personally I think the MONA thing is hilarious, especially in the context of the Discourse.
for non-Australians, the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania had an area called the Ladies Lounge, where men were not allowed. They hung several fake Picassos, an antique mink rug that was actually polyester, and a bunch of fake tribal spears. The idea was that it was a criticism of the general idea of the patriarchy where men typically have a lot more opportunities for... pick a thing. Even when women were allowed in, what was actually inside were cheap replicas devoid of any amount of authenticity. It's ripping on token inclusion.
In an eye-watering display of self-awareness deficiency, a man then sued MONA for not being allowed in, claiming discrimination due to being a man. He claimed that as he had paid admission to the whole of MONA but was not permitted to this specific exhibit due to his gender, he was being discriminated against.
The Tasmanian Civil Tribunal agreed, and MONA was directed to admit men into a women's-only area. The irony is thick enough that you could cut it with a knife.
MONA, in response, dismantled the exhibit except for the fake Picassos. All the bathrooms at MONA are single-occupancy all-gender, but it turns out having a women's bathroom from which men are excluded *isn't* discriminatory, so they converted one into a women's bathroom and hung the fake Picassos in there, an exhibit of itself.
The art exhibit was basically a criticism of "turns out the only safe space for women away from men is a bathroom, and people will still claim that you're getting special rights because you get to see something nobody else can. Even if what you're seeing is a cheap replica, someone somewhere will claim that you have it good because you're getting something they don't."
Picasso's estate, however, took a rather dim view of unauthorised replicas being displayed in an art gallery in Tasmania, even though it was literally years between putting up the artwork and someone noticing. They've since been taken down with no further action.
MONA has declared that the Ladies Lounge will return as something where S26 of the Sex Discrimination Act doesn't apply, such as a church or boutique glamping experience.
They've also expressly stated that the Ladies Lounge includes ALL women, not just cis ones.
I love everything about this story. Fucking classic stuff coming out of the art world.
Wes Streeting: βThis ban [on puberty blockers] brings the private sector in line with the NHS. We are committed to providing young people with the evidence-led care that they deserveβ. Evidence shows that blockers are of great help.
This 2018 article from the Guardian lives rent-free in my head. I think about it often.
Michell Baker: βif we have Stem education without the humanities, or without ethics, or without understanding human behavior, then we are intentionally building the next generation of technologists who have not even the framework or the education or vocabulary to think about the relationship of Stem to society or humans or life.β
TIL that in the UK political system the two following statements are both true :
1) in order to vote for a candidate in a general election, you must provide photo ID.
2) in order to stand as a candidate in a constituency, to hopefully receive votes cast by those people mentioned in #1, you are *not* required to provide any photo ID.
On their trip home my Taiwanese colleague was shocked that #UK border officer that #BRP will expire at the end of this year; they told me and I said "yeah I knew but I have not heard anything or get any notification"....we both emailed our HR and HR said "oh HomeOffice told us this website for the new #evisa please try it and let us know". We went and did it just like that....HR and us are both relieved...all along we thought why no one from HO announced this � Many thanks for our HR though
I must admit to finding it mighty coincidental that the advertising industry is suddenly collaborating with browser vendors to add new ad measurement features that don't use cookies after laws were passed prohibiting the use of tracking cookies without consent.
So far as I'm aware GDPR is technology neutral so tracking users through any mechanism would also require consent. The Firefox thing sounds like it's intended to avoid collection of PII, so that it would be GDPR compliant.
Figures that ads got there. Ads creep into everything, turning things that were or could've been good (not the case with touchscreen-only car consoles, though) into shit
Itβs amazing to me how quickly OpenAI speed ran the cycle from βweβre just a bunch of nerds building cool tech to change the worldβ to βweβre at war with our employees who think weβre a soulless for-profit corporationβ.
It took Google decades to run through whatβs taken OpenAI months
OpenAI whistleblowers filed a complaint with the SEC where they allege the AI company is silencing employees from sharing concerns about its AI technology.
Iβm annoyed that weβve found a way to spend 100 times more electricity over standard search to have computers confidently provide wrong answers to questions.
Every time someone says "Snowflake should have enforced better security" I like to remind them that if Snowflake wasn't trivially easy to use, you wouldn't know the name Snowflake.
Real talk: security is friction and friction doesn't attract customers.
A #degooglification lesson, AKA "centralization is bad" even when the Good Guysβ’ do it because it makes you less resilient:
One of the key piece of many (but not all) degooglified Android systems is a tool called "microG". It basically "pretends" to apps that you have Google Services installed, emulating the many system APIs basically all apps depend on.
One of these APIs are Location. In fact, you used to be able to install "add-ons", download a CSV of cell-towers and run mobile cell tower-based approximate geolocation fully locally. Wellβ¦
> The new location stack does not support UnifiedNlp modules anymore. This was a step necessary to take to get locations properly working on latest Android versions. [β¦] For now, the new locations stack is relying exclusively on Mozilla Location Service for network based location.
Every time you reduce diversity and increase centralization you introduce choke points, bottlenecks and single points of failures that *will* come back to haunt you.
It's been literally a single week that Labour have been in power and already they have committed to continuing the same transphobic policies as the Tories, with Wes Streeting (a pitiful quisling who wants to further privatise the NHS) planning to make the Tories' last minute ban on puberty blockers a permanent fixture. This currently makes it criminal to prescribe puberty blockers to trans youth (although cis kids can still get them, it's just trans kids who are excluded), and the intention is for it to stay that way.
This essentially means for nobody to be able to start transition until the age of 18, at which point it'll probably still take years on end before they can even get an initial appointment (I am 18 months into my own wait.)
Streeting has also walked back any previous support he's shown for trans rights, literally saying he's changed his mind about previous supportive statements, and favouring segregated healthcare for trans women in hospitals.
He is an unpopular politician who barely got elected last week, and one of his core strategies seems to be making our lives worse. Labour's "reset moment" on "toxic" trans discourse appears to just be to focus on destroying us more quietly, instead of as loudly as possible like the Tories did.
Here's something for you though - a lot of Labour MPs do not like this, and actually probably would want to take our side. Wes has never met with any trans focused orgs or really anyone to discuss our needs. Other MPs will though - I believe Notts Pastel Project, as a local example for me, have arranged a meeting with Nadia Whittome MP to discuss this.
Labour just got a landslide victory, you *might* be able to get your MP on side. If you think they're at all amenable to helping out, please write to them. I already intend to be in regular contact with my local MP, who claims himself a trans ally, and I'll gonna be writing him myself this weekend to try and move the needle on this.
We cannot rely on Labour themselves to fix this for us. The call is coming from inside the house - they're the problem as much as the solution. As much as we need to pressure the incumbent political forces to do the right thing, we should also be trying to find out how we can take care of each other in the face of a system that is increasingly hostile toward us. How we can protest to make our voices heard, and to make life hell for the people working to destroy us. How we can organise to make it clear we're not just a political punchbag you can abuse in order to appease gammon dipshits.
Find a local trans org. Tell our "allies" about this. Find a way to help out.
Just do something if you can, please. This shit is gonna end lives.
It turns out Google Chrome ships a default, hidden extension that allows code on `*.google.com` access to private APIs, including your current CPU usage
You can test it out by pasting the following into your Chrome DevTools console on any Google page:
It turns out Google Chrome (via Chromium) includes a default extension which makes extra services available to code running on the `*.google.com` domains - tweeted about today [by Luca Casonato](https://twitter.
So I turned off the new Firefox advertiser-friendly stuff.
But somehow I feel this isn't enough. I want to do more than just turn the feature off, I would prefer to submit poisoned and false data to it continually.
Anyone know a plugin that will flood this bullshit system with fake AI lies or anything like that?
In the page explaining why they silently forced this bullshit on me they say "Attribution is very important to advertisers"
Fuck advertisers. Fuck them. You get that Firefox? It is not your job to be kind to advertisers, it is your job to fuck them on my behalf.
Arrived back safely from #Anthrocon2024 as of yesterday. Back in the cool Winter weather of Sydney π¦πΊ. Happy #FursuitFriday and have a great weekend!
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