From TalkingPointMemo, on the Supreme Court oral arguments challenging the Idaho ban on trans girls paying in girls sports: The justices spent most of their time during oral arguments on the equal protection claims, and seemed to coalesce behind a position that could have ramifications for small minorities beyond the trans community: that Idaho and […]
The Financial Times just coined the phrase “the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter,” which honestly is the best turn of phrase I’ve heard since enshitification. What’s going on is that X (the aforementioned site) recently released an update that makes it incredibly easy to generate, well, deepfake porn based on real images. As
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David Kurtz, TPM: “Jan. 6 felt that momentous then, not just as a culmination of the conspiracy to subvert the 2020 election, but a clear and present choice about what path the country would take from there… The results of the 2024 election made clear which fork we took, and so we now remember the
Remember my dear, the sixth of the year… Read More »
Every year for the past 36 years or so my friend Jay and I have exchanged Christmas gifts that are trapped in some way. Open it without disarming the trap and they’ll “explode” (set off a loud cap, sometimes with accompanying flash paper), fire nerf darts, set off an alarm, or the like. For a
As we say goodbye to Mariah Carey for another year, please enjoy one of my favorite Christmas mash-ups. As one of the YouTube comments put it: “A perfect mix of absolute pure evil and Marilyn Manson.”
KQED’s California Report Magazine has produced a beautiful deep-dive series Love You For You, featuring six conversations between trans, non-binary and gender-expansive kids across California with their parents, grand-parents and mentors. Well worth checking out, either at the above link or at The California Report Magazine podcast.
Love you for you: Conversations Between Trans Kids and Their Loved Ones Read More »
A magistrate judge in the ongoing copyright suit against OpenAI has ordered them to turn over a sample of 20 million private chat logs from ChatGPT users to plaintiffs, stating that the protective order baring lawyers from leaking the contents and OpenAI’s own “de-identification” of the logs should be sufficient to protect these user’s privacy.
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Tom Lehrer worked at the NSA from 1955 through 1957, and a recent thread on BlueSky reveals one of the papers he wrote while there included a bibliographical entry for “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds” by Lobachevsky. Apparently the joke went unnoticed for almost 60 years. [via
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I started playing Magic The Gathering when I was at Stanford back in early 1994, and introduced it to my high school friends when I went back to Atlanta that summer. One of those friends was Jay Schneider, who has this amazing habit of taking up a hobby and turning it into something world-class, so
History of the Sligh / Geeba deck in MTG Read More »
I just heard Tom Lehrer died yesterday at the age of 97. I first heard of Tom Lehrer reading the lyrics to The Hunting Song in one of my Dad’s old Mad Magazines, though like many of my generation I didn’t realize he was the same guy who sang Silent E, L-Y and a bunch
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