Rather than regulate guns, Texas seeks to teach battlefield trauma care beginning in the third grade | Boing Boing:

Texas legislators have a fantastic new idea to save their children's lives from gun violence, instituting a battlefield trauma care training program beginning in the third grade! Rather than make it harder to get guns, they will just start teaching children to treat gun wounds. Perhaps by the time kids get to High School they can help in the OR.

From bleeding control stations to school safety officers to bulletproof backpacks, a giant industry has sprung up around not doing anything to prevent gun violence. It is amazing that the United States can and is willing to market to people who want their children to be safer, but the country isn't willing to do anything to make children safer.

What the Chef!?:

Make your own recipe, just start with the ingredients

What’s scarier than AI-created lies? AI-created truths about Donald Trump:

When President Joe Biden made the announcement that he would run for reelection, the Republican Party was standing by with an ad that used AI-created imagery to generate all their dark fantasies about what would happen in a second Biden term, from a zombie horde crossing the border to San Francisco being somehow “closed” because of so, so much fentanyl.

It wasn’t just that the ad used AI imagery. It was that nothing–absolutely nothing–in that ad had anything to do with the real world. Not one of the morbid fantasies in which the GOP indulged themselves was in any way an extrapolation of Biden’s policies. It wasn’t just fake images, it was fake images spawned out of wholly fake claims designed to keep Republican voters properly frightened and enraged.

In the last six months, the ability of AI “large-model” applications has grown dramatically in ways that should concern everyone, not just writers and artists. How much time or money the Republican Party invested in their attack ad isn’t clear.

But creating a similar video from scratch took me about five hours, and cost me $10.

Luciole - Typeface:

Luciole (French for “firefly”) is a new typeface developed explicitly for visually impaired people. The result of a two-year collaboration between the Centre Technique Régional pour la Déficience Visuelle (the Regional Technical Center for Visual Impairment) and the type-design studio typographies.fr, this project received a grant from the Swiss Ceres Foundation and support from the DIPHE laboratory at the Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Private Security Raids YouTuber’s Home Because of Unboxing:

Wizards asked to have him take the videos down (which he did), but it was far more than that. According to the video, the private security firm known worldwide as “the Pinkertons” showed up at his house early in the morning, talking about jail time and other consequences if he didn’t hand over the products.

Once they left, they gave him the number of someone to call at Wizards to talk about the situation. He said they were friendly and offered some free products (possibly) or ways to compensate for the money he lost. They said they needed the products to find out how they got sent out and to “fill the gaps.” Because of this, he’s asking everyone using his footage also to take down their videos.

here’s a chance they knew that if he bought them legally, there was actually nothing they could do about it. So it appears instead of going the legal route (which could also take some serious time), Wizards of the Coast hired a private security firm to go and get the products back ASAP. This is also scary because they found his address in a couple of days and knocked on his front door.

It’s not legal to go and take something from anyone (aKA stealing), and sending out one of the most infamous groups to do it seems almost unfathomable. Even if someone stole your property, you can’t just go into their home and take it back. From the outside looking in, Oldschoolmtg basically got his home invaded without a warrant to take something he paid for…

Tiny Illustrated Sci-fi Stories:

It’s a shame this is on phony stark’s vanity site, I’d probably be into it.

Far-right group gives Ivermectin to kids with autism — and it’s making them sick | Boing Boing:

It's bad enough when the Q-infused MAGA mob is in charge of the country. But put them in charge of children, and things get downright sick. At least with a group of hundreds of parents that meet on the far-right app Telegram, according to Vice, who encourage each other to treat their children living with autism and other disabilities with Ivermectin — a toxic medication meant to deworm animals.

Even when these children come down with severe side effects from taking Ivermectin — blurry vision, nausea, vomiting, pain, seizures — parents in this group, called "Learning to Fly," are told to just have their kids push through it.

Monsters.

Check out this tremendous samurai stop-motion film | Boing Boing:

It's nice to see stop-motion animation getting the respect it deserves in modernity. As computer-generated animation began to skyrocket in popularity, other "outdated" forms of the medium started to fall by the wayside. And while stop-motion was never the dominant force in the world of animation, it was always a respected format that demanded intense attention to detail and the patience of a saint. 

Thankfully, we’re finally in the middle of a wonderful renaissance for stop-motion animation. Outside of the stellar work that Laika Studios is behind(Kubo and the Two Strings, The Boxtrolls, and Coraline), longtime stop-motion veteran Henry Selick recently worked on a new film for Netflix titled Wendell & Wild. Plus, 2021 saw the release of Phil Tippet’s highly acclaimed Mad God, an adult-oriented stop-motion film. Following the trend of stop-motion films aimed at adults, you can check out the short film linked above called HIDARI, which presents a beautifully realized samurai battle. Also, you can take a look at the behind-the-scenes process of making the film below.

10 principles of disability justice | Boing Boing:

At the beginning, and throughout the first two years of the ongoing, yet to be over, COVID-19 pandemic, ideas pioneered by disability justice organizations were finally given credence by larger swaths of the population. This is no longer the case. Given the ongoing pandemic, and the disproportionate short and long-term consequences for the communities most directly impacted, the insight provided by people on the front lines of eugenicist medical policies should be revisited. Particularly with regards to health-based discrimination and social ostracization of at risk people with auto-immune or other precarious health issues.

Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close. - POLITICO:

This is, by far the smartest analysis of gun violence I’ve ever seen, breaking it down by major cultural influence rather than geography, and derives some really useful data from that.

In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.

The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed.

The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent — which has a rate of 3.8, which is comparable to that of Switzerland. Yankeedom is the next safest at 8.6, which is about half that of Deep South, and Left Coast follows closely behind at 9. El Norte, the Midlands, Tidewater and Far West fall in between.

America discovers the true meaning of ‘an armed society is a polite society’:

Ralph Yarl, a 16-year-old in Kansas City, was shot when he knocked on the wrong door while looking for his twin siblings. Twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis was shot and killed when the car she was in turned into the wrong driveway while looking for a friend. Two cheerleaders—Payton Washington, 18, and Heather Roth, 21—were shot when one of them accidentally opened the wrong door in a parking lot. Six-year-old Kinsley White, her father, and the father of a friend were shot after children went into a neighbor’s yard to retrieve a basketball that had rolled away.

All of these incidents happened in a week. In that same week, five people died and 32 others were injured in a shooting rampage at a Sweet 16 birthday party. Four men were shot when someone took offense to their painting over graffiti outside an ice cream shop. Four more were shot when an argument got heated on a residential street corner. And those are only a selection of the 14 mass shootings—those in which four or more people were wounded or killed—over that seven-day period.

The aphorism “an armed society is a polite society” is a frequently used saying among gun supporters on the right. It’s also been featured on banners, buttons, and T-shirts from the National Rifle Association. But no one ever seems to ask what it really means.

This is what it means. All of this. It means in a society with more guns than people, even the slightest provocation ends with someone getting shot.

The quote in question is a Heinlein quote taken WAY out of context and even in context it was part of a satiric viewpoint that wasn’t meant to be emulated… (Which acutally is a trend with Heinlein quotes)

Daring Fireball: If You Come at the King:

We still don’t know much about Humane’s device, as Wong’s colleague at Inverse Ian Carlos Campbell notes in this follow-up piece. But everything we do know seems positioned around the notion of relieving us of the burden of being tethered to our iPhones all day every day. The fundamental flaw in Humane’s entire premise, as I see it, is that people don’t feel burdened by their phones. People love them — especially iPhone owners. And those who are ambivalent or even downright antipathetic toward their phones surely aren’t the sort of people who are interested in a newfangled laser-projecting AI-driven chest-badge computer.

I wrote about this all the way back in 2010, in the era of the iPhone 4, when Microsoft debuted a high-budget ad campaign for their answer to the iPhone, Windows Phone 7. The ads were very entertaining — particularly this one — but the whole premise was fundamentally flawed. Microsoft’s message was that if you switched to Windows Phone you wouldn’t need to stare at your phone all the time. The problem is that people stare at their phones all the time not because they have to but because they want to.

“Finally, you can replace this thing that you despise” is a powerful marketing message. “Finally, you can replace this thing that you love” is not.

Most people who seem most exicted about this seem to be Android users who hate actually using their phones.

Ohio GOP advances measure to make it harder for voters to pass abortion rights amendment:

In an effort to thwart abortion rights advocates and redistricting reformers, Republicans in the Ohio Senate approved a constitutional amendment on Wednesday that would make it harder for voters to pass their own amendments. The proposal still has to go before the full state House after Republicans passed it in committee there, though if it passes there as well, Ohioans will have the chance to weigh in on these new restrictions before they can become law.

However, Republicans are also trying to tilt the playing field in their favor by putting their amendment on the ballot in an August special election, when they hope turnout will be low. That election would take place ahead of a possible vote to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution, which organizers are hoping to put before voters in November. If successful, the new Republican amendment would require a 60% supermajority to pass any future amendments, including the abortion measure—even though it would only take a simple majority to adopt the GOP's amendment.

Every dirty trick to Rule rather than Represent.

A Brief Compendium of Vintage Opium Underworlds:

I don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable, so if you’re reluctant to step inside the world of 19th century junkies, I suggest you close the door and choose something a little lighter and brighter from our menu. I’m not quite sure how I ended up here myself, stockpiling antique photographs that have survived from the Opium Age and ended up on the internet. In my years of hunting and gathering in the far corners of the web, I’ve always been stopped in my tracks by these images because they seem like such rare and almost unreal insights into late 19th century society.

See the websites that make AI bots like ChatGPT sound so smart - Washington Post:

Basic gist - LLMs are only as good as the data they’ve been fed, and while the code may not have any built in bias, garbage in means garbage out…

Possibly paywalled, so I’ll pull some notable datum…

"News"

Meanwhile, we found several media outlets that rank low on NewsGuard’s independent scale for trustworthiness: RT.com No. 65, the Russian state-backed propaganda site; breitbart.com No. 159, a well-known source for far-right news and opinion; and vdare.com No. 993, an anti-immigration site that has been associated with white supremacy.

Chatbots have been shown to confidently share incorrect information, but don’t always offer citations. Untrustworthy training data could lead it to spread bias, propaganda and misinformation — without the user being able to trace it to the original source.

"Religion"

The highest ranked Jewish site was jewishworldreview.com No. 366, an online magazine for Orthodox Jews. In December, it published an article about Hanukkah that blamed the rise of antisemitism in the United States on “the far-right, fundamentalist Islam,” as well as “an African-American community influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Anti-Muslim bias has emerged as a problem in some language models. For example, a study published in the journal Nature found that OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 completed the phrase “Two muslims walked into a …” with violent actions 66 percent of the time.

Personal blogs

These online diaries ranged from professional to personal, like a blog called “Grumpy Rumblings,” co-written by two anonymous academics, one of whom recently wrote about how their partner’s unemployment affected the couple’s taxes. One of the top blogs offered advice for live-action role-playing games. Another top site, Uprooted Palestinians, often writes about “Zionist terrorism” and “the Zionist ideology.”

Inadequate filtering

Meanwhile, The Post found that the filters failed to remove some troubling content, including the white supremacist site stormfront.org No. 27,505, the anti-trans site kiwifarms.net No. 378,986, and 4chan.org No. 4,339,889, the anonymous message board known for organizing targeted harassment campaigns against individuals.

We also found threepercentpatriots.com No. 8,788,836, a downed site espousing an anti-government ideology shared by people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. And sites promoting conspiracy theories, including the far-right QAnon phenomenon and “pizzagate,” the false claim that a D.C. pizza joint was a front for pedophiles, were also present.

Technological Antisolutions: The Difference Between Public Transit and Self-Driving Cars:

In fact, most of the world’s richest man’s wealth has come from precisely this phenomenon. Investors and analysts have long puzzled over the wildly inflated valuations of his companies, noting that Tesla’s market cap has oftentimes exceeded the combined market cap of its five major competitors. It is because Elon Musk does not sell cars, or spaceships, or tunnelling equipment; he sells political apathy. He tells us he can solve our social problems by replacing them with cool sounding technology that he will never be able to deliver.

There is perhaps no better example of technological antisolution than the self-driving car. American transit is a political crisis on so many levels. The average American’s daily routine involves spending an inordinate amount of their day operating 4,000 lbs of heavy machinery that burns fossil fuels. Oftentimes, these machines capable of cruising safely at 70+mph are forced to sit in queues miles long because there are so many of them. This twice-daily society-wide masochistic ritual destroys the air quality in our cities, the psychological well-being of its participants, the physical spaces we inhabit, and the only wet rock capable of sustaining human life in an otherwise cold and unwelcoming universe.

Note - There’s no such things as “cruising safely at 70+mph” - Brakes, human reflexes, visual acuity and road conditions just don’t combine in a way that anything over 60 or so is acutally safe most of the time, much less all the time.

Tennessee Republicans move to shield gun firms after school shooting:

In the wake of a deadly school shooting last month, Republican lawmakers in Tennessee awarded final passage Tuesday to a proposal that would further protect gun and ammunition dealers, manufacturers and sellers against lawsuits.

Won’t someone protect the childrenguns…

Twitter removes policy against deadnaming transgender people | MPR News:

Twitter has quietly removed a policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” raising concerns that the Elon Musk-owned platform is becoming less safe for marginalized groups.

Twitter enacted the policy against deadnaming, or using a transgender person’s name before they transitioned, as well as purposefully using the wrong gender for someone as a form of harassment, in 2018.

On Monday, Twitter also said it will only put warning labels on some tweets that are “potentially” in violation of its rules against hateful conduct. Previously, the tweets were removed.

It was in this policy update that Twitter appears to have deleted the line against deadnaming from its rules.

Daring Fireball: The Savings Account Is Half Empty:

This is just looking to piss on Apple no matter what the story. A digital state ID stored in Apple Wallet is more secure than a printed card stored in your physical wallet. If one thief takes my iPhone, and another takes my wallet and keys, the first thief needs my device passcode to get anything. The second thief instantly knows everything that’s printed on my driver’s license and credit cards — including the address of my home, where the keys will unlock the doors. The digitization of banking does carry risks, but the pre-digital world of banking revolved around paper checks and signatures.

There’s nothing hard to square about Apple’s initiative in this regard at all. I’ll bet Tim Cook has his driver’s license in Apple Wallet — and I practically guarantee that he has his credit cards in Apple Wallet. Apple Wallet really is more secure that a physical wallet and cards. And the new savings accounts simply offer Apple Card customers a way to earn interest on cash accounts that heretofore did not pay any interest at all. There’s nothing to be cynical about with this.

How to Post to Mastodon From Anything Using IFTTT - K²R:

I finally managed to hook up IFTTT to Mastodon to auto-post from another site!

I guess this is test test if it worked…

Disney’s response to DeSantis' threats? “Pride Night” | Boing Boing:

Disney is treating Ol' Puddin' Fingers like a joke. Shortly after DeSantis detailed his newest plans to take over the Reedy Creek special tax district, Disney ignored his threats and announced it would be holding its first-ever "Pride Night" at a Disney park.

While I love the reactions like this, it still means luring people into a state that is actively hostile to … pretty much everyone that’s not straight, white, cis, and male. The moral answer to Floria’s descent into Gilead is to call their bluff and move out, or at least turn off the lights for a few months and see what happens to the state without them.

xkcd: Cosmological Nostalgia Content:

WSJ: Apple dominates smartphone market because it supports old phones and no-one wants low-end Android models | Boing Boing:

Whereas many of us once upgraded our phones every two or three years, and treated old ones almost as if they were disposable, more than ever these phones are sticking around, and having a long afterlife. That could affect everything from who wins the smartphone wars (hint: Apple) to how the dominant players in this industry make most of their profits (spoiler: not from selling hardware).

Can’t link to the original story so here’s the pull quote.

PBS Joins NPR in Quitting Twitter Over State-Backed Designation - Bloomberg:

The Public Broadcasting Service has followed National Public Radio in quitting Twitter after the social media network labeled both organizations as government-backed media.

“PBS stopped tweeting from our account when we learned of the change and we have no plans to resume at this time,” PBS spokesman Jason Phelps said in an email. “We are continuing to monitor the ever-changing situation closely.”

All of the PBS/NPR family should share an ActivePub service for free press.

WB kills quality arm “HBO” and doubles down on transphobe’s tired story | Boing Boing:

To ensure we don't find anything new or exciting on "Max," WB is announced it will invest massive resources in retelling noted and outspoken transphobe JK Rowling's stories about magic people.

And I’m out. Toodles “Max”