Opal

Hearing a Costa Rican immigration officer respond with an enthusiastic, "That's wonderful! Welcome!" to the news that my wife and I are seeking residence caught me off guard.

It's a bittersweet reminder of how America lost its way. Imagine ICE or CBP saying such a thing.

perhaps the biggest story TFPever ran was a catastrophically shoddy argument that George Floyd ackshully died of an overdose. When confronted with irrefutable evidence that the piece was simply wrong, Weiss didn’t take it down, she asked her critic, @radleybalko.bsky.social, to come on a podcast.

normal person: i just want a place to hang out with my friends
tech weirdo: and shitheads
np: no just my friends
tw: but what about hearing alternative views on race and gender?
np: we just want to hang out and goof around
tw: so where do the shitheads fit in then
np: no shitheads
tw: not following

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Lucy is promising that this time she will definitely hold the football.

Saw some post somewhere earlier about people “not getting” transness or whatever

You don’t have to get it.

If you believe in bodily autonomy for all, then no one needs you to understand their personal situation to earn being seen as a person by you.

You just treat every human being as a person.

An autoethnographic critique of a past report of inpatient psychiatric treatment for gender diverse children Contrary to ongoing representations of efficacy, “therapy” that aimed to change or suppress a gender diverse child served to delay self-acceptance for two decades and caused long term harm 

An incredible article casting serious doubt on claims made by transphobes, about conversion therapy for trans kids. The 1987 publication upon which their claims are based, is thoroughly discredited, it cannot justify the claims it makes.

Chapeau: @fiercemum.bsky.social

TW: Conversion therapy

Build Community Online with Decentralized Tools | Blacksky Decentralized tools to build community online. The intercommunal net where communities govern, pool funds and stay safe on their own terms.

You may notice my handle has changed.

I have migrated from bsky.social, Bluesky Social's PDS, to myatproto.social, a general-use PDS operated by Blacksky Algorithms (blackskyweb.xyz) which is open to non-Black users. I used tektite.cc; it was straightforward and painless.

A WILD ONE: A man broke his leg during an arrest by ICE at a car wash south of L.A.

ICE has held him under 24/7 guard at a hospital, registering him under a pseudonym, for *37 days* without telling him why.

A judge has ordered his immediate release.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

📣 Germany's close to reversing its opposition to mass surveillance & private message scanning, & backing the Chat Control bill. This could end private comms-& Signal-in the EU.

Time's short and they're counting on obscurity: please let German politicians know how horrifying their reversal would be.

When's their flags at half-mast? When's their bipartisan resolution? When do these children get 24/7 coverage of their too-short lives and endless interrogation of their murderer's ideology?

racism in the trans community is extremely real and extremely dangerous.

unfortunately, a lot of white trans people haven't done the work to be anti-racist and don't notice how they mistreat and dehumanize Black and brown trans women.

you gotta put the work in. bring POC into your social circles.

more like the American legal system is inherently unequal and that fact has inevitably reached powerful people

The fact they jumped straight to AI actors modeled after women when, if I’m not mistaken, male actors are a higher labor cost kind of says it all doesn’t it,

Speaking from experience:

...yeah.

It’s National Poetry Day.

The greatest poem in the English language.

I always am.

Opinion | What Hegseth got right about the military Put aside the defense secretary’s bravura and focus on his message about muscular armed services

Another banger from the author of "Relax, we'll be fine no matter who wins [in 2016]" and "Calm down, Roe vs. Wade isn't going anywhere" (in 2018)

Clarification: I think being mean to AI is fine. I think made up slurs for robots is DEEPLY suspect and usually a sign of someone wanting to do a racism without being cancelled, but it is also not actually as bad as doing real racism and saying real slurs at real people. Everything in context, yeah?

as a girl with a PhD in natural language processing and machine learning it's actually offensive to me when you say "we don't know how LLMs work so they might be conscious"

I didn't spend 10 years in mines of academia to be told ignorance is morally equal knowledge.

We know exactly how LLMs work.

They wanna say slurs SO bad

"chatbot" is already 1. accurate, 2. dismissive and 3. upsets the people that you want to upset, the idea of trying to manufacture a slur is fuckin embarrassing and a waste of time

history teacher in 50 years: So in September, that’s when the president signed an executive order criminalizing anti-fascism and saying all resistance would be crushed

student: oh so that’s when the whole country realized they were living under fascism

teacher: haha what? oh no lol not at all. no.

bigotry is tautologically an irrational prejudice against persons or people based on immutable or social characteristics, not legitimate criticisms against the most ecologically devastating technology since the coal-powered steam engine, hope this helps

No, they're too stupid/racist to CARE about tribal IDs.

There's no fucking way tribal IDs aren't included in training material, field manuals, checklists, and other paperwork.

They know about it; they just don't care. Because "brown == bad" is the only thought they can fit in their heads.

it does actually. sorry

were these people always incurious buffoons with delusions of grandeur despite having approximately the creative thinking skills of your average labrador retriever or does talking to "ai assistants" all the time give you the same psychic damage you get from being surrounded by paid sycophants

We need to understand that, too. There is no "reform." Either poorly trained people with no impulse control can murder people on the streets while we watch, or we have a democracy.

The two are antithetical.

This isn't "one bad apple" shit. It never was. This isn't even a collection of rotten apples that has spoiled the other apples.

They were never apples. The fruit was always poison. All of it.