Brian Beach has moved @bwbeach@qoto.org

Excuse me, WiCyS is being hosted in Nashville next year? Where it's like not even safe for trans women to legally or physically exist? That's... um. It's a thing. I genuinely appreciate a lot of stuff they do, but I'm flummoxed.

TikTok: Look! I discovered hot water melts frozen food faster!

Twitter: Look at this TikTok video showing how to defrost your food faster!

Yahoo news: Millions of Twitter users view TikTok video showing new life hack for melting frozen food!

Mastodon: Please read my academic white paper describing the impacts of public school system underfunding

"In Defense of Studying 'Basket Weaving' at College" 🧺

An essay on why cultural subjects that get derided for being silly or frivolous (and, surprise surprise, are historically the province of women and indigenous groups) turn out to be intellectually fascinating, deep, and practical as hell

My essay, for Medium subscribers: https://clivethompson.medium.com/in-defense-of-studying-basket-weaving-at-college-a862792f3a85

A "friend" link in case you're not a Medium subscriber: https://clivethompson.medium.com/in-defense-of-studying-basket-weaving-at-college-a862792f3a85?sk=05da00e8ad388013630497ce92368ed8

The EU’s “chat control” legislation is the most alarming proposal I’ve ever read. Taken in context, it is essentially a design for the most powerful text and image-based mass surveillance system the free world has ever seen.

Excited today to have a great guest post from @riana about how Section 230 and the internet are actually important for food safety, and how undermining 230 could make us all less safe *physically* as well. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/09/another-casualty-if-section-230-gets-repealed-food-safety-data/

Yikers: A new paper on reconstructing images from brain activity. Better fasten your mind belts; we're in for a bumpy ride! https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/ #AI #ML

Alaska Says It’s Now Legal “in Some Instances” to Discriminate Against LGBTQ Individuals
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On the advice of the state’s attorney general, Alaska’s civil rights agency quietly deleted language promising equal protections for LGBTQ Alaskans against most categories of discrimination, and it began refusing to investigate complaints.

#Alaska #LGBTQ #CivilRights #Discrimination #SCOTUS

https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-drops-lgbtq-discrimination-ban?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

Comment I just left on a PR: "YES!! I love this, always love to see more smaller functions, and this is a really nice self-contained chunk of logic to break out. Excellent call."

This is your semi-regular reminder to call out the good things in code reviews along with the changes you're suggesting! Coding is an inherently human endeavor, humans have feelings, and that is an attribute, not an inconvenience to be optimized away.

Also, this applies to many other feedback-oriented scenarios too, I imagine. When interfacing over digital mediums, I can always use more reminders that there's a person on the other end.

@pluralistic we frankly need a huge tax on virgin plastic to reflect the externalized costs it involves

Very good look at the variety of problems with automated decision making for social services, credit ratings, predicted recidivism, etc.. Products exist doing these things right now, and there are no regulations or checks.

The systems are flawed and dangerous; resulting in deaths, false accusations, imprisonment, children being taken away, and more.

#ML #ExpertSystems #SocialJustice

Against Predictive Optimization https://predictive-optimization.cs.princeton.edu/

Let's all use our outside voices as we shout once again:

The law that protects hate speech on the internet is *not* Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The law that *actually does* protect hate speech on the Internet is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/23/your-simple-solution-to-section-230-is-bad-julia-angwin-edition/

"I think that if you're going to dump on something in the way many people do about ORMs, you have to state the alternative. What do you do instead of an ORM?"

I've only had this tab open for months. I love this: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/OrmHate.html

This is your regular reminder that “pre-crime” is a lie. Using surveillance to predict crime does not work and disproportionately targets marginalized people and communities.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/02/22/auror-crime-intelligence-surveillance/