Renee

Uploading Pirated Books via BitTorrent Qualifies as Fair Use, Meta Argues * TorrentFreak In an ongoing lawsuit, Meta now argues that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use.

In 2013 Aaron Swartz committed suicide for facing 35 years in prison for mass downloading scientific articles.

13 years later, Meta is almost getting away with an infraction orders of magnitude larger.

The law didn't change.

torrentfreak.com/uploading-pi...

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

The asymmetry of the value placed on human life is so striking. Israel has a goal to recover 40-year-old remains; to do so, it invades a sovereign country, and the lives of 26 Lebanese are an afterthought. Their names not even worth printing in the New York Times.

Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez:

You may have heard that Spain is alone. They’re the same people who said that when we recognized the State of Palestine, and then others followed.

We are not alone — we are the first. Those who will end up alone are the ones defending the indefensible.

Northern view from Lake Point Tower overlooking the Chicago shoreline where it meets Lake Michigan. // Image captured at: 2026-03-07 01:06:13 UTC (about 1 min. prior to this post) // Image sourced from: youtube.com/@LakefrontLive // Current Temp in Chicago: 62 F | 17 C // Precip: moderate rain // Wind: SSW at 9 mph | 15 kph // Humidity: 94%

Current* conditions near Chicago, IL:

toad the wet sprocket was just gin blossoms under a pseudonym, it's the same thing bsky.app/profile/pppi...

important thing to understand about rock in the pre-limp bizkit 90s is that there were 7 songs: smells like teen spirit, evenflow, mr jones, and 4 gin blossoms songs that all sounded exactly alike bsky.app/profile/eeee...

i've noted before that every generation of white people gets a song that drives them insane ("don't stop believing," "creep," "mr brightside," etc) and i think that awful radiohead song making it instead of one of those gin blossoms songs was a real inflection point. won't be taking questions

as is their natural diet

"vote blue no matter who" having a rough one this morning

If they had DEI they’d know it was Targét not Tarzhay

Never forget

Congressional Dems are in a tough spot. On one hand, they could gain incredible advantage in the upcoming midterms by vigorously denouncing Trump's reckless war. On the other hand, they like it.

U.S. Troops Were Told Iran War Is for “Armageddon,” Return of Jesus Advocacy group reports commanders giving similar messages at more than 30 installations in every branch of the military

"A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers ... that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was 'anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,'"
jonathanlarsen.substack.com/p/us-troops-...

Yes! Total agree. I watched Derry Girls straight through right after I watched HTGTHFB and another delight!

Additionally, I want to speak directly to Iranian New Yorkers: you are part of the fabric of this city — you are our neighbors, small business owners, students, artists, workers, and community leaders. You will be safe here.

This massacre wasn't constitutional!!!

US-Israeli strike on girls' school kills at least 85 students, Iran's judiciary says At least 85 students have been killed in US-Israeli strikes that hit an Iranian girls' school in Hormozgan province, Iran's judiciary said on Saturday. Washington has not commented on the reported str...

We killed 85 schoolgirls. We are not the good guys.

Please - PLEASE - do not take this to imply that a football tournament is somehow in the top 250 most important aspects today.

Simply that the US has been given a pass in the past and it is time to treat us as the hostile and unsafe country that it is.

Oh fuck off

“How many of these gentle people have I helped to kill just by paying my taxes?" June Jordan, 1984

For the first time in Gallup history —

More Americans sympathize with Palestinians in the “Middle East Situation” than with Israelis.

41% Palestinians (+8)
36% Israelis (-10)

Democrats: Palestinians +48
Independents: Palestinians +11
Ages 18-34: Palestinians +30
Ages 35-54: Palestinians +18

This is what I need cis folks to understand.

It's been a decade.

Imagine living TEN FUCKING YEARS watching as a blatant, artificial campaign to erase your personhood, your identity and your safety chugs along, increasing in power every single day, and most people don't care or dismiss it

I used to work on the 12th floor of Bobst & I've seen the former president & his security take over the service elevator to avoid the riff raff. (Was it the elevator on the far right? That one just goes to 11 & 12; staff that work on those floors also use it too but the security on it now is WILD.)

They won't start with banning birth control. First they'll lie about it. Then dictate who can prescribe it, use it, fund it, in what forms, and for how long. Suddenly, your doctor won't call you back. I know this is what they'll do because it's what they're doing to transgender healthcare right now.

Imagine telling kids: Listen, rich people made this somewhat crappy product they're going to make you use when you end up having to work for them, so we have to teach you how to try to use it and that's a lot of work for both of us because it's pretty crappy.

That's called "AI literacy."

(If you're working with my team you are getting paid for course development and have a mid-career instructional designer assigned to work one-on-one with you and build out your course in the LMS.)

I've been in this business for nearly 20 years. None of this stuff is that hard. You can't figure out what you want your students to get from readings and write it down? You don't know what the week is going to look like and can't describe it? This is your job as a faculty member. It's so depressing

to asking a videographer to film in the studio so the faculty could put it through AI so they could have an avatar speaking rather than a human to asking an LLM to produce guided reading questions to having an LLM write weekly overviews.

At our team meeting yesterday I asked all of the instructional designers and multimedia folks to discuss ways faculty are using AI in course development, and I can't decide if I'm really sad or really mad right now. It ranged from feeding a syllabus into copilot and asking it to produce a course