something fascinating in the idea underlying that second quote there–that AI is so Western-biased currently in terms of training data that developing nations actually have a much easier time using it to generate persuasive and engaging propaganda than developed nations. critical support to Iran in this regard, i suppose lol

see also the coverage this has gotten in NPR:

The campaign, “Resist and Unsubscribe,” was started by influential podcaster and business commentator Scott Galloway, who said he was increasingly frustrated by what he sees as the Trump administration’s indifference to protests and public outrage over immigration enforcement, especially in Minneapolis, where federal immigration officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens last month.

In recent weeks, there have been renewed calls to boycott Target, demanding that the Minneapolis-based retail giant publicly show solidarity with immigrants and oppose ICE. Last month, hundreds of businesses in Minneapolis shuttered their doors for a day as a form of protest against ICE operations in the city.

Galloway, who also teaches marketing at New York University, believes the president mainly changes course on policy when financial markets are under pressure, pointing to how Trump dropped his plan to impose tariffs on eight European nations after it rattled Wall Street. So, Galloway created a website listing over a dozen companies that have either worked directly with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or play such an outsized role in the economy that a slowdown in their growth would send shockwaves to the markets.

" I think this is a weapon that is hiding in plain sight," Galloway told NPR. “The most radical act you can perform in a capitalist society is non-participation.”

they’re actually more overzealous in terms of policy about nudity and sexualized material than basically any alternative

It’s so common for “anti-censorship” to be code for “Nazi-friendly” that I’m immediately suspicious of any platform that uses that as a selling point.

i don’t know if it’s a function of the ideological bent or just because the gigantic influx of users has totally swamped their moderation, but yes it does have problems with fascists as of writing

oh, this is probably just because of the national strike day people are observing–it’ll be back up tomorrow

you can subscribe over here:

Who are we? A collective of writers, editors, and designers who love to cook and eat, bon vivants who aspire to never be boring on the palate or the page. We will be delivering, piping hot or pleasantly cool, a newsletter to your inbox twice weekly. One will contain a recipe from our brilliant squad culinaire; the other will deliver investigations, scoops, dispatches, postcards, love letters, decoder rings, instruction manuals, vibe reports, archival cuts, menu doodles, paeans, diatribes, and gossip from the front lines of the human appetite. We will not use AI, because it has no taste.

Like any good meal, our most basic aspiration is to fill an empty space. Food is the stuff of life, and over the last 20 years has gone from a niche concern (beyond the “everybody eats” of it all) to a pillar of popular culture. And yet we’ve seen the number of outlets devoted to exploring it with genuine curiosity and delight dwindle over that same period. The legacy brands largely botched the transition from print to digital, chasing the pipe dream of infinite glassy eyeballs, and diluted their missions in the process. In an attempt to reach everyone, they no longer speak to anyone. Least of all, us: people who really care about food and cooking. Now, 16 years after it was unceremoniously folded, Gourmet has become a symbol of a food media that once was, a name sighed nostalgically to evoke a delicious absence.

This new Gourmet will be a return to form in some ways—fascinating, well-written, eccentric, delicious—but we will rely directly on our readers to keep the lights on, and avoid the hierarchies, inequities, and bloat of the ancien régime. We would rather write for a cohort of fellow travelers, passionate home cooks and nerds, than chase the dream of infinite scale.

We’re obviously not the only ones seeking alternatives to the Old Ways of Doing Things. Countless individual writers and cooks have set out on their own with a Substack, TikTok, or YouTube channel to disseminate recipes and tell stories about food. We love what many of them are doing.

But not everybody wants to be a singer-songwriter—some of us want to be in a band. There is something about a shared effort, a wobbly but recognizable editorial voice, a publication that is a stage, not a microphone, that we missed, and wanted to try to make. There is something, in other words, about a magazine.

As reported by Gamemakers and GameSpark and translated by Automaton, Fontworks LETS discontinued its game licence plan at the end of November.

The expensive replacement plan – offered through Fontwork’s parent company, Monotype – doesn’t even provide local pricing for Japanese developers, and comes with a 25,000 user-cap, which is likely not workable for Japan’s bigger studios.

The problem is further compounded by the difficulties and complexities of securing fonts that can accurately transcribe Kanji and Katakana characters.

the interview in question, which opens with the following exchange:

Newton: You have joined us today to talk about this new age-gating policy that Roblox is rolling out to protect kids. And I think we should start by just talking about the scope of the problem here. What has led you to this point? And how do you think of the problem of predators on Roblox?

Baszucki: We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well. (emphasis mine) How do we allow young people to build, communicate and hang out together? How do we build the future of communication at the same time? So we, you know, we’ve been, I think in a good way, working on this ever since we started. And when we were — this was almost 18 or 19 years ago — when we first launched the company and we had just four of us sitting in a room, we were literally the moderators, like we would rotate all the time. And so fast-forward to where we are today, it’s just like every week, what is the latest tech? At the scale we’re at, 150 million daily actives, 11 billion hours a month, like what is the best way to keep pushing this forward? And as you correctly note, we’ve just started adding that we’re going to be using facial age estimation with A.I. to complement that.

Children can still protest, fundraise, and engage in other forms of direct action. Children are not helpless or incapable.

you are shadowboxing with things i didn’t say and are the only person inserting the terms “helpless” or “incapable” here, but also once again: this is a game marketed at literal children. i stopped playing Roblox at 14 and doing some research i’m led to believe that would be quite old for a Roblox player. probably half or more of the player-base is 13 or younger. do you honestly expect the average 13-year-old (or younger) to be capable of anything other than performative activism relating to the genocide in Palestine?

Holding a pro-Palestine candlelight vigil in Roblox, for example, whilst there are still Palestinian civilians being murdered is a woefully inadequate use of time and effort if you actually want to help.

the people holding a vigil like this are probably literal children, because Roblox is a game for and overwhelmingly played by children, so i don’t understand the criticism here–it’s unlikely they can help in any material way you could as an adult, but they can be politicized into understanding who deserves their sympathy and who is perpetrating harm that must be ended, which such a rally helps affirm

please continue to “device hoard” folks

given that OpenAI has a vested interest in downplaying the severity of this problem (especially relative to its total number of users) i’d treat this as a lower bound of the scale of this exists at–pretty bad!

there’s some real deadpan gold in this one, such as the immaculate:

How do you feel about becoming a political lightning rod?

People occasionally just flip [me] off or whatever, but nobody’s come up to me and tried to make a statement about anything. Personally, it’s kind of dumb. It’s just a vehicle. So it’s ironic that it would even become a political statement, but nonetheless it is. [Editor’s note: Taylor was arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. He was later pardoned by President Trump.]

the relevant paper here:

Humpback Whales Blow Poloidal Vortex Bubble Rings.

for more on this, see the New York Times article on the observatory: How Astronomers Will Deal With 60 Million Billion Bytes of Imagery

Each image taken by Rubin’s camera consists of 3.2 billion pixels that may contain previously undiscovered asteroids, dwarf planets, supernovas and galaxies. And each pixel records one of 65,536 shades of gray. That’s 6.4 billion bytes of information in just one picture. Ten of those images would contain roughly as much data as all of the words that The New York Times has published in print during its 173-year history. Rubin will capture about 1,000 images each night.

As the data from each image is quickly shuffled to the observatory’s computer servers, the telescope will pivot to the next patch of sky, taking a picture every 40 seconds or so.

It will do that over and over again almost nightly for a decade.

The final tally will total about 60 million billion bytes of image data. That is a “6” followed by 16 zeros: 60,000,000,000,000,000.

the study: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

associated article in Nature:

Why we should protect the high seas from all extraction, forever: Exploitation of the high seas risks doing irreversible damage to biodiversity, climate stability and ocean equity. A consensus must be built now to save them.

someone on Bluesky analogized what is happening to how QAnon transpired for most people, which is that the crazification it was causing simmered under the surface until January 6, when it all publicly exploded and the influence it had over a non-trivial block of the population became undeniable. hard to disagree with that!

the paper in question: Efficient mRNA delivery to resting T cells to reverse HIV latency by Paula M. Cevaal et al.