Cary

California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed California’s proposed Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act in late September, fearing it would stifle “innovation.” [SB 1047; veto, PDF; BBC]

But the bill Newsom did sign was Assembly Bill 2013. From 2026, companies that make generative AI models available in California need to list their models’ training sets on their websites — before they release or modify the models. It’s a short and clear act. [Press release; AB 2013; Bloomberg, archive]

The law will also apply to any model that has been publicly available in California since January 1, 2022.

Artists and creators support the act because they don’t want their work stolen. AI companies hate it because it forces them to disclose what they are doing.

Last year, OpenAI refused to disclose GPT-4’s training sets because “these models are very potent.” Uh-huh. [Verge, 2023]

Newsom also signed AB 1008, which clarifies that any personal data fed to an AI model retains the same privacy rights it would otherwise — including the consumer’s right to correct and delete their personal information. That’ll be a fun one to implement. [AB 1008]

memewhore:

stupidpetface:

santapau:

Remind me later.

naamahdarling:

victusinveritas:

WTF this is masterful, 10/10.

thevaultoftheatomicspaceage:

femmedummy:

by following me you agree to the terms*

*you think I am hot and sexy

literaturebf:

the mutuals sound like this

@lizardgirlclaws

andalizard:

catchymemes:

#i saw someone litter the other day and i was flabbergasted#i didn’t know people actually genuinely just. did that

The Institute For Local Self Reliance (disclosure: I have done writing and research for them) has released an updated interactive map of every community-owned and operated broadband network in the U.S.

All told, there’s now 400 community-owned broadband networks serving more than 700 U.S. towns and cities nationwide, and the pace of growth shows no sign of slowing down.

Some of these networks are directly owned by a municipality. Some are freshly-built cooperatives. Some are extensions of the existing city-owned electrical utility. All of them are an organic, popular, grass-roots community-driven reaction to telecom market failure and expensive, patchy access.

A breakdown of the new mapping data from the folks at ILSR notes that the number of community broadband networks has been increasing at about a rate of fifteen per year, up from the 8 per year cadence the organization saw between 2001 and 2008. The number of communities served by larger, popular community networks (like Chattanooga’s EPB and Utah’s UTOPIA) continue to grow.

Data routinely notes that community-owned broadband networks provide faster, cheaper, better service than their larger private-sector counterparts. Staffed by locals, they’re also more directly accountable and responsive to the needs of locals. They’re also just hugely popular across the partisan spectrum; routinely winning awards for service.

Many such deployments (like UTOPIA) involve building open access fiber infrastructure that numerous competitors (private, public, or otherwise) come in and compete over. In many of these areas, locals have the option of more than a dozen different ISPs to choose from, all providing broadband at a lower rate than what you’re used to from Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, or Charter.

That’s not to suggest community-owned broadband networks are some mystical panacea; they require smart leadership, strategic planning, and intelligent financing. But if done well, they not only drive significant fiber improvements directly to local markets, they incentivize lumbering regional private sector monopolies — long pampered by federal government corruption and muted competition — to actually try.

Widespread frustration with substandard U.S. broadband drove a big boost in such networks during COVID lockdowns. Since January 1, 2021, more than 47 new networks have come online, with dozens in the planning or pre-construction phases. Many are seeing a big financial boost thanks to 2021 COVID relief (ARPA) and infrastructure bill (IIJA) legislation funding (the latter of which hasn’t even arrived yet).

In response to this popular grass roots movement, giant ISPs have worked tirelessly to outlaw such efforts, regardless of voter intent. 16 states still have protectionist state laws, usually ghost written by giant telecom monopolies, prohibiting the construction or expansion of community broadband. House Republicans went so far as to try and ban all community broadband during a pandemic.

Lumbering regional monopolies like Comcast, AT&T, and Charter could have responded to this movement by lowering prices and improving service. Instead in many cases they found it cheaper to lobby politicians, sue fledgling networks, or create fake “consumer groups” tasked with spreading lies about the perils of community-owned broadband networks among local communities.

But based on the growth rate of such networks, these efforts have backfired, and locally-owned and operated broadband networks appear to be more popular than ever.

cipheramnesia:

were–ralph:

this is so fucking funny

He’s been here the whole time

dovewithscales:

lilli-sturmreiter:

cumpriest:

hidrellez:

you gotta include this photo

ağlıycam

This is it. The internet has come full circle. You can all go home now. We’re done.

penny-anna:

i used to do this musical theatre day camp when i was a teenager & for the most part the performances were u know. well-known musicals by enthusiastic teens w no sets or costumes rehearsed over a couple of days. you can imagine.

but anyway one year they put on Little Shop of Horrors, a show that is notably difficult to stage on a budget of no money due to typically featuring well u know a giant plant puppet.

the way they decided to stage this was, they got a bunch of green rubber gloves. when Audrey II first appeared he was 1 kid using their gloved hand like a puppet. u know what i mean.

but then as Audrey II got bigger they had more and more kids put on green gloves and join the plant. when a character got eaten their actor would become part of the plant.

by the end of the show every actor in the chorus was part of Audrey II except for the kid playing Seymour, who played his final scene against a mob before being eaten.

& then for the finale the entire company played Audrey II.

i still think about this sometimes. it was such a genuinely ingenious way to stage the show without puppets. legitimately unsettling to watch. what the fuck!!

catsformom:

immortalbeingz:

[ID: A man says to his dog, “All right buddy. Wait until I say go. Okay?” Then he turns around and walks a few paces away. Without waiting, the dog starts charging, jumps on a trampoline, and jumps at the man. Right when the man turns around, the dog strikes him in the head and throws him to the ground. /end ID]

Found here.

John Quiggin makes two very good points about CEOs and their desire to force workers back to the office full-time, or nearly so. The first is something I’ve mentioned before–managers that aren’t in meetings feel superfluous to requirements (boldface mine):

The real concern driving CEO resistance is the fact remote work involves a previously unthinkable change in the way productive activity is structured and organised. If workers can do without the physical presence of managers, perhaps they don’t need managers at all, at least in the way they currently operate. The eagerness of CEOs and other senior managers to wish these changes away suggests that, at some level, they realise this.

As Gideon Haigh observed 20 years ago, the era of neoliberalism has been associated with the “cult of the CEO”. The office has been the shrine of that cult. In their plaintive call for a return there, CEOs are like declining deities who see their votaries deserting them.

But there’s a second point that I found interesting:

…a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.

Many of the factors contributing to corporate success or failure, such as interest and exchange rates, booms and recessions, and changes in consumer tastes are outside the control of CEOs. And the success or failure of technical innovations is, to a large extent, a matter of chance.

By contrast, the organisation of work within the corporation is something over which CEOs have a lot of control. The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since.

Again, the loss of control makes them nervous, because what if they (or at least a subset of them) are deemed irrelevant to most outcomes? That would be good for workers, but not for them personally.

kaijuno:

My dad has bees. Today, I went to his house and he showed me all the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off a 5-gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were 3 little bees, struggling. They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them and he said he was sure they wouldn’t survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose.

I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly, after all he was the one who taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty Chobani yogurt container and put the plastic container outside.

Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, there were bees flying all over outside.

We put the 3 little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all their sisters (all of the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all of the honey off of their bodies. We came back a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters.

When it was time for me to leave, we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty.

Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown in their own stickiness and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free.

Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates.

We could all learn a thing or two from these bees.

Bee kind always.

ALT

New whale dropped.

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totallynotagentphilcoulson:

jenroses:

dragons-and-gays:

teaboot:

teaboot:

Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen

“These artifacts were excavated by archaeologists from a burial site in the 1970’s. The remains were returned for reinterment” Okay cool, cool cool. So you just, like. Dug up the grave of a respected family member, stripped them naked, mailed their body back to their family and kept everything they were lovingly put to rest in. Like a graverobbing bastard

Reminds me of the time when of the elders from my hometown started touching a totem pole in the Museum of Anthropology out at UBC and got yelled at by the staff, only to tell him that the pole had been stolen off of the front of her bighouse when she was ten years old.

Museum collectors did the equivalent of kidnapping a family member when they were away fishing.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires all institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate remains and artifacts so if you can identify the source of something on display absolutely get a hold of that institute’s repatriation office

Somewhere over the streets of San Francisco’s Mission, a microphone sits surveilling … for banger songs.

Bop Spotter is a project by technologist Riley Walz in which he has hidden an Android phone in a box on a pole, rigged it to be solar powered, and has set it to record audio and periodically sends it to Shazam’s API to determine which songs people are playing in public. 

Walz describes it as ShotSpotter, but for music. 

“This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals,” Walz’s website reads. “It's about catching vibes. A constant feed of what’s popping off in real-time.”

ShotSpotter, of course, is the microphone-based, “gunshot detection” surveillance company that cities around the country have spent millions of dollars on. ShotSpotter is often inaccurate, and sometimes detects things like fireworks or a car backfiring as gunshots. Chicago, one of ShotSpotter’s biggest clients, is finally allowing its contract with the company to end.

Bop Spotter, on the other hand, is designed to figure out what cool music people are blasting from their cars or as they walk down the street.

“I am a chronic Shazam-er. Most songs I listen to come from first hearing them at a party, store, or on the street,” Walz told 404 Media. “Years ago I had the thought that it’d be cool to Shazam 24/7 from a fixed location, and I recently learned about ShotSpotter, and thought it’d be amusing to do what they do with music instead of gunshots. Was a great weekend project.”

Walz said that the phone itself is rigged to a solar panel, and that it records audio in 10-minute blocks while in airplane mode. “Then it connects to WiFi to send the file to my server, which then split it into 20-second chunks that get passed to Shazam’s API. The device doesn’t Shazam directly, that would use way too much power. Probably $100 of parts,” he said. 

BopSpotter’s website has a constant feed of songs it hears, as well as links to play the songs in Spotify or Apple Music. As I’m writing this, BopSpotter has picked up “Not Like Us” by Kendrick Lamar, “The Next Episode” by Dr. Dre, and “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley (a Rick Roll already?) among dozens of songs in the last few hours. The site also has a constant feed of the device’s power levels. So far in three days, it has detected 380 songs.

“I thought the solar panel would be annoying but it provides 4 times more power than the phone needs,” Walz said. “The hardest part was scoping out which pole to actually put it up on. I had to balance finding a busy location where lots of music could be picked up, with enough sunlight, and good connection to a public wifi network.”

Walz declined to say exactly where the phone is, but said it’s in a plastic box and sent me a photo that he asked me not to publish because the location would be identifiable. 

“I think it’s not hard for someone with authority to find, especially if they knew what it looked like. With all hope, it will stay up for several years!,” he said. His favorite bops thus far?  “‘Just the Two of Us’ by Bill Withers and Grover Washington played Sunday at 3am. Goes so hard.”

donnerpartyofone:

highlandvalley:

路駐してもバレないバイクちょっと良いな
https://x.com/yuruhuwa_kdenpa/status/1840518223370088684

good morning

amnhnyc:

One small step for leeches, one giant leap for leechkind! For the first time, we have concrete evidence that at least one species of terrestrial leech in Madagascar can jump. Mai’s work is important to conservation efforts because leeches are increasingly being collected to survey vertebrate biodiversity. By analyzing their blood meals, researchers are able to identify other animals living alongside the leeches, ranging from wildcats to frogs to ground-dwelling birds. Read more about Mai’s research in our latest blog post.

Have you ever seen a leech jump? Let us know in the comments!

Cute that it’s about the discovery that land leeches jump but some people are like “wait back up there are land leeches?!” There always have been silly! Entire human cultures exist who likely never thought of them as aquatic creatures, they’re walking all over rainforests around the world :)

jazzybot4:

bisquid:

ralfmaximus:

shi1498912:

theelectricfrog:

kunosoura:

birdblogwhichisforbirds:

friendshapedhole:

nandomando:

Story is wild

Little girl was part of a county fair agro-educational program where they raise an animal for a few months and at the end it’s slaughtered. Supposed to teach them about the economics of farming and stuff.

But the little girl loved her goat so much she was crying on the day her goat was supposed to be taken away, so her mom sent the county fair people an email saying “I’ll pay for the goat and any expenses. We’ve had several deaths in the family in the past year, I don’t wanna take away one more thing my little girl loves.” Technically the goat had already been sold at auction, so the mom was on the hook for about $1000, only about $70 of which would have been profit for the county fair.

The county fair people were irate and got law enforcement involved, over this “breach of contract”. They literally got a fucking judge to sign a search warrant, authorizing them to go to this little girl’s house and search every room and every cabinet or box “large enough to contain a small goat”. The sheriff’s deputies seized the goat, and whoever they gave it to immediately slaughtered it, though they were supposed to wait until some kind of agreement had been worked out.

In the county fair’s initial email correspondence with the girl’s mother, they made it clear that they were pissed off because the story of the little girl who loved her goat was circulating on social media making them look bad, and they felt the girl needed to be taught a lesson about keeping your promises or whatever. So they refused the mother’s offer to pay for it, and insisted they get the goat. Even if it meant sending the fucking cops into her house lmao.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-30/goat-slaughter-shasta-county-fair

the congressman who bought the goat didn’t have any objections to the family saving the goat from slaughter either! it’s fucking insane that the cops were so eager to play act their swat commando fantasies that they played stooge to the benefit of no one except some self important local organizers!

Alternate link, LAtimes locks their stuff behind paywalls sometimes

Don’t forget the part where the goat wasn’t where they had a warrant to search, so they drove 500 miles, leaving the area they have legal jurisdiction in, then searched a farm they didn’t have a warrant for ans seized the goat. The fair then had the goat slaughtered, even though a court had ordered them to keep it alive until ownership was resolved and despite the fact that both potential owners of the goat had decided to keep it alive.

They broke multiple laws in order to “teach” a little girl the “lesson” that “everybody has to follow the rules”.

I sure hope all of the complaints sent to Shasta District Fair CEO Melanie Silva, whose decisions these were and continues to defend her actions, are polite and don’t waste too much ink. I’m certain nobody would take advantage of the fact that the Sasha District Fair and Event Center’s contact page lists their phone and fax numbers, not to mention the email form below that.

Would be a shame if that information was to circulate far an wide, and ruin that despicable woman’s easter holidays

I found the lawsuit filing. It is a work of art, brief and to the point. If you read nothing else, check out page 2, the section headed Nature of the Action. Magnificent.

One of the things that bugs me in the notes is a bunch of people being like ‘it’s a livestock animal, it’s her fault for getting attached’ and.

My dudes, I cannot emphasize enough that the little girl’s emotional attachment to the goat is in fact the least of the issues with this story. The main issue in this story is the fact that a bunch of cops broke multiple laws, including the unlawful entry to the property the goat was being held, the unlawful seizure and destruction of said goat, and the unlawful use of a criminal search warrant in a civil dispute case, just to start with.

The little girl owned the goat. At no point in the proceedings - and indeed at no point in the proceedings in the course of the normal auction-purchase-slaughter of a livestock animal in this program - did the fair own the goat. At no point in the proceedings did the person who successfully bid on the goat actually own it - he had made the winning bid to purchase rights to the meat. He hadn’t even done that yet! The goat legally and incontrovertibly belonged to the little girl. The very worst that should have happened in this story is a brief property ownership dispute in a civil court.

The fair CEO decided to unlawfully force the auction of the goat, and, when the girl’s mother began to dispute her actions, to make a false claim of theft, with precisely ZERO legal basis, calling the cops on an already emotionally fragile child, and then had the temerity to be angry with the child’s mother because the story was making them look bad on social media.

Regardless of your opinion on the meat industry, livestock slaughter, or 4H, 'cops drive 500 miles, perform an illegal search, seizure and destruction of an American citizen’s property, on the word of a biased 3rd party with zero legal rights to the property in question’ should make you angry. Because it is a violation of civil rights, and also had no motive besides needless cruelty to an already grieving child.

News to know: The next court update on this is sometime in October 2024. I’m watching this case because it covers a lot of different facets of how contracts work, minors rights, property rights in the face of law enforcement seizures and searches, and how does one county fair have so much brutality to wield against a then-nine-year-old.

I would not be surprised if this gets bogged down again with more counter-suits. It’s absolutely ghoulish that they’re doing all this over less than 1000$ of goat and one little girls grief. I hope that the judge who sees this case knows just how dangerous it is to dismiss, since this is a matter of third-party property rights infringement using law enforcement agents as bludgeons. The Sheriffs *cannot* be allowed to maintain extrajudicial authority.

brucesterling:

gloriousunderstanding:

starfleet: we’re glad you’re home

starfleet: we’ve been reviewing your records

janeway: k when is my promotion

starfleet: what makes you think you’re getting a promotion

janeway: my future self told me all about it when she broke the temporal prime directive and brought me stolen future technology

starfleet: yeah so in that vein there are some things we need to discuss

janeway: if there’s a problem with the paperwork blame chakotay

janeway: i don’t do forms i do holographic irish bartenders and former borg drones

starfleet:

doctor: i can assure you that while in the delta quadrant we conducted ourselves with grace and dignity according to the highest principles of starfleet

b'elanna: yeah step off our balls you weren’t there you don’t know

tom: yeah you weren’t there that time we stole a keg of omega molecules from some douchebag aliens who were going to blow up the quadrant

harry: or that time we played space nascar and ended up in the center of a terrorist plot

tom: or that time we were all super horny and built a fake irish city so that we could get drunk and laid

harry: or when we tied that guy to a chair and waited for the aliens to eat him because he wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know

tom: oh shit remember that time i got 30 days for ignoring the wishes of some foreign government and destroying their mining operation

harry: that was almost as crazy as the time you restored that old shuttle but then it fell in love with you and tried to kill b'elanna

b'elanna: speaking of which remember when that bomb i made for the maquis came back and tried to kill us

chakotay: that reminds me of when seska stole my dna and tried to impregnate herself with my child

tom: nothing will ever compare to the time me and the captain had kids and left them on that planet

janeway: we were young and innocent then

tom: how many lizard years to a human year i feel like i should send a birthday card

janeway: like 6

tom: you don’t even know you’re just saying that

janeway: you should talk you’re such an absent father

tom: oh no you didn’t

janeway: i didn’t even want kids

starfleet:

starfleet: is there a reason you stenciled PARTY BUS on the side of voyager

tom:

harry:

b'elanna:

doctor:

janeway: is there a reason i shouldn’t have

ristay:

ristay:

She is obsessed with him. (Btw her name is Petunia and my black beast is Atreyu).

He’s given up trying to get away from her. They sleep like this almost every night.

Follow me on Webtoons

ristay

Since everyone liked that photo so much, here’s the last two weeks of their love 😂😂