tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

In a blistering 2-1 decision, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals torched Florida's "Individual Freedom Act," a law barring public university instructors from "endorsing" a list of 8 banned concepts about race, sex, and privilege, ruling it violates the 1st Amendment.

The ruling quotes Prof. David F. Cavers - "The Florida defendants cannot “put together half a donkey and half a camel, and then ride to victory on the synthetic hybrid.”"

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca11.80813/gov.uscourts.ca11.80813.11014486517.1.pdf
https://www.rawstory.com/court-thrashes-red-state-s-breathtaking-attempt-to-ban-unpopular-ideas/
#UsPol
1/n

In the war room at the White House at 3am a cloud of wild strawberry vape smoke hangs heavy over furrowed brows and blank stares as urgent questions are addressed. How do we gain vengeance? Shall we kidnap the President of Belgium? Or do we simply bomb its capital, Luxembourg?

UK left-wing news site The Canary suspends its national weekday print newspaper after two weeks, saying Lloyds closed its bank account and withheld funds (Alice Brooker/Press Gazette)

https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/the-canary-print-newspaper-two-week-run-debanking-claims/
http://mediagazer.com/260706/p7#a260706p7

They don't have the legislative majority to repeal the Clean Air Act -- one of the most successful and popular laws in US history -- so they are simply destroying it by other means.

Trump Pardons Violators of the...

Can you safely put false or harmful text in finetuning data if you clearly label it as false? A new paper says no. Train a model on documents that repeatedly warn a claim is fabricated, and it still asserts the claim as true afterward, up from near zero to about 89% of answers. The warning is the part training ignores. It holds for behavior too: transcripts flagged as malicious still teach the behavior, a real data-poisoning risk.

https://benjaminhan.net/posts/20260704-negation-neglect/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

#LLMs #FineTuning #AISafety #AI

Rubriker om massdöd i klimatkrisens extremhetta bildsätts med badande semesterfirare, solstolar och parasoller. Det är surrealistiskt. Det är ovärdigt. Vi håller på att tappa kontrollen över klimatet och medierna verkar leva i total förnekelse

www.etc.se/ledare/tusen...

Tusen döda i hettan – då badar...

Om du är forskare eller folkbildare så kan du skriva på ett upprop till stöd för den stora klimatdemonstrationen den 23/8 och för en ambitiös klimatpolitik.

Om du inte är det, men känner nån sån så tipsa dem gärna:
https://enadeforklimatet.nu/

On Sunday at 18:30 JST, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft will attempt flyby observations of asteroid Torifune as part of the "Extended Mission", after delivering the samples from asteroid Ryugu to Earth. The spacecraft was designed for rendezvous observations, so needs to get pretty close to the asteroid for good data. Cross everything, friends 🤞

https://global.jaxa.jp/press/2026/06/20260609-1_e.html

#canada

Institutional investors hold $6,500,000,000,000 in coal, oil and gas companies. We track who holds what and make that data available to everyone

https://investinginclimatechaos.org/

#ClimateChange #UpheavalClimate #ClimateInstability #ClimateReversal #MassAtrocity #pollution #ecology #environment #climate

This is another reminder that extreme heat affects more than just our air temperatures. The impacts are also being felt across terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.

Reports of a fish kill nearby DC in the Potomac with water temperatures over 90°F (32°C)...

Today the last person at risk from the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius completed their quarantine, tested negative, and returned home, Tedros said in an @WHO presser.
"We are therefore very pleased to say that WHO considers the outbreak of hantavirus over.""

Did you know?

"When North American cities signed on in 2018 to host the 2026 World Cup, part of the agreement with FIFA was that transportation to matches would be free for fans."

We know that didn't happen.
But:
"FIFA essentially forced American cities, even car-centric ones, to run month-long experiments in public transit."

This is a fascinating tale.

https://www.dezeen.com/2026/06/30/world-cup-transit-opinion-deb-chachra/

Viva México! 🇲🇽

The CRASH Clock paper is now peer-reviewed! So to celebrate, my co-authors and I wrote an explainer article (because how better to celebrate one article than by writing another... oh academia...)

It's now published in The Conversation Canada: https://theconversation.com/a-new-crash-clock-measures-the-chance-of-satellite-collisions-and-its-ticking-down-fast-283481

‼️⚖️ The US Supreme Court has declared all independent authorities unconsitutional – effectively blowing up the EU-US deal on data transfers.

Click the link below for noyb's full assessment of the situation, and prepare for a Schrems III case!

https://noyb.eu/en/us-supreme-court-just-blew-eu-us-data-transfers

more progress on my uniform population projection maps. have fixed the holes in the previous ones

this is showing population density as experienced by people - every square is approx 150k people, and the colour of that square tells you the density they live at (blue = dense, red = sparse)

i particularly enjoy how you can see how unusual the US is - the only country that comes close in terms of sprawl is Russia

now the next job is to understand why the mapping has gone up from 2MB to 150MB...

Remember xkcd 1132, https://xkcd.com/1132/? Prompted by some recent discussion over at https://www.patreon.com/betanalpha/posts/explaining-joke-162341925, I ended up implementing frequentist and Bayesian analysis of the setup and writing up the subtle issue what I think the example really illustrates, https://www.patreon.com/betanalpha/posts/explaining-joke-162341925.

A promotional image for a padel club in Dubai shows a talented player, mid-swing and eyes locked on the ball. He’s also a key figure in the Kinahan cartel, the Irish organised crime group involved in drug trafficking, money laundering and arms smuggling. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/06/27/poster-boy-sanctioned-kinahan-cartel-lieutenant-found-playing-padel-in-dubai//?utm_source=mastodon