ceoln @ceoln@qoto.org

Handwringing about "people" (read: women) being single always had an implicit "lower your standards" vibe.

Now the pressure to marry Trump voters has grown more explicit.

This is a terrible idea. Here's why it's good most young women won't date MAGA.

https://www.salon.com/2023/11/28/its-a-good-thing-women-wont-date/

Like, I really don't get why so many of you are so eager to have statistical models write code for you.

I've been arguing for literally my whole career that the actual writing isn't the hard part of software development. But wow, did everyone take that in the wrong direction recently.

Understanding the system is the hard and valuable part. And I genuinely don't know how you think you're going to do that if you never get to do any of the safe and easy interactions with the system.

time travel was a mistake unless you're a cat then it's great

Hey folks!

Please do NOT report artists for sharing links to where the art is available to purchase!

Just DO NOT be such a jerk!

If you want artists to keep sharing their work on mastodon, this whole "absolute no commercial posts at all" attitude has to stop. There is a huge difference between a big corporate ad campaign and an individual artist posting a link to their own art shop.

#ArtForSale #art

🇫🇷 The French welfare agency uses an algorithm to detect potential fraudsters. Every month, it ranks the households of 32 million people, including 13 million children, with a "risk score".

For the first time, @LaQuadrature obtained its source code and could run it.

The criteria that increase the risk score are
- being poor,
- living in a poor neighborhood,
- being a single mother,
- being unemployed,
- having a disability.

https://www.laquadrature.net/2023/11/27/notation-des-allocataires-lindecence-des-pratiques-de-la-caf-desormais-indeniable/

If God wanted us to have unlimited free energy He’d have put a giant fusion reactor in the sky.

This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI

> The tool, called #Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against #AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training #data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, #Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless...

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/

27 November 1942 | A Polish woman Anna Smoleńska (b. 20 Feb 1920) was incarcerated in Auschwitz.

A girl scout, student of history of arts, author of the 'Kotwica - Fighting Poland' emblem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotwica ).

She received camp no. 26008. She perished in Auschwitz on 19 March 1943.

#Auschwitz #woman #symbol #Poland

#Bookstodon: A Stranger In Your Own City, by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

At one point early on the author mentions Iraq's occupation and my reaction was "interesting, I wonder who occupied...oh."
I realized I had never read a story about the war from the Iraqi point of view. I apparently thought opposing the war was enough, but had skipped looking directly at what happened. A devastating read but very important for U.S. citizens.

https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-stranger-in-your-own-city-travels-in-the-middle-east-s-long-war-ghaith-abdul-ahad/18564190?ean=9780593536889

#nonfiction #war #foreignpolicy #middleeast

They referred to her as “Moses” for guiding the enslaved from the South to freedom in the North. But, Harriet Tubman’s resistance to slavery extended beyond her role in the Underground Railroad. As a Union Army soldier and spy during the Civil War, she made history by becoming the first woman to lead an armed US military mission.

1/

Image: “Harriet Tubman,” by Mark Fredrickson

Monopoly™️ is an old game

"George Orwell predicted this

An onslaught of fake propaganda about a Niagara Falls car crash. Government officials trying to crush news orgs with investigations. Journalists killed at a record pace

Press freedom - and the truth - under attack."

If @willbunch wrote it, you should read it.©...& I thread it. 1/... 🧵

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/free-press-right-wing-authoritarianism-20231126.html#loaded

@RIDDLES

#caturday-6