scholars and critics, sitting on a wheelbarrow full of evidence from the past fifty years that of course this kind of thing is going to happen, shrugging in frustration: the purpose of a system is what it does!
fascist sexist techbros, high-fiving: the purpose of a system is what it does!
I’m pretty sure the techbros’ mantra is “The purpose of a system is to make us mountains of money, and we don’t give a fuck about the harms it cause to people and planet.”
If anyone is wondering how well ‘AI’ in hiring is going:
My partner just tried putting her CV through some ATS checkers that use LLMs. Her name can be turned into a male name by deleting one letter. Doing so caused her score to jump 10 points.
Anyone using these tools for hiring is going to have some massive discrimination lawsuits in their future.
I just backed Recovering After Gen AI on @Kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimcrawley/recovering-after-gen-ai
Agh, sympathies for the nightmare.
1. Testing for "okay to hang out for now":
On the virus.sucks web site they say
"While there is no "golden rule", many users have successfully avoided household infections with a re-test window of ~12 to – at most – 24 hours." So I usually would re-mask after about 12 if not re-testing.
2. Testing out of quarantine:
It's hard to get reliable data on this, but from what I've seen, it seemed like most people would have detectable virus 3 days after they caught it. (If anyone knows better, I'll be very interested.)
So, not saying this is absolutely guaranteed safe, but after possible exposure, we have been doing "4 nights bubbling separately, then Pluslife test the next morning".
The extra night is because, by the time we've done 3 days of carefulness, for me I feel like it's not that much of a hardship to wait one more night. But that feeling is partly because I can have a room to myself to sleep, so "separate bubble at night" doesn't involve any masking, except if I nip to the loo in the middle of the night. If I had to, or specially wanted to, share a room at night, then I might risk simply counting off 3x24 hours, rather than sleeping masked which I find difficult.
Disclaimer, this regime has not been tried against actual infection. When I got covid, it was before we _had_ the Pluslife.
3. Also from the virus.sucks FAQ:
"Covid tends to show up in throat samples much earlier than in nasal swabs, which is why many Pluslife users perform a throat swab or combined nasal and throat swab to detect infection as early as possible."
Wishing you luck!
Long COVID patients are told symptoms are in their head – here’s how to change the narrative
#Health #LongCOVID #MECFS #ChronicIllness #COVID19 #PostCOVID #LongHaulers #BrainHealth #NervousSystem #PatientCare #InvisibleIllness #ChronicPain #Rehabilitation
https://the-14.com/long-covid-patients-are-told-symptoms-are-in-their-head-heres-how-to-change-the-narrative/
@HollieK72 we're actually taking more sick leave since 2020. Did anything happen in 2020 to make us less healthy? It's a mystery @Anke @hoppla
The mask of democracy has fallen in the EU parliament, and this is the face that was revealed.
Heard this crazy story of American "justice" on the Criminal podcast.
A man is arrested for a crime cos the police used AI facial recognition. The man has a solid alibi: he was in hospital cos his child was being born.
6 months later, he pleads guilty. Why? He's been locked up all this time, awaiting trial. The only way he gets to go home to his new baby is to admit to a crime he didn't commit.
This is that craziness @mekkaokereke keeps telling us about.
https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-371-thats-not-me
Shel Silverstein poem published in 1981 …. Hmm does this remind you of anything topically relevant to today?
"Why can't we use the climate destroying Magic 8 Ball to do peer review?!" 😭😭😭😭
The number of liberals who believed both that
a) Evangelicals who supported someone as venally corrupt and profoundly immoral as Donald Trump are deeply, irredeemably hypocritical
and
b) it was vitally important to support Graham Platner no matter what because Vote Blue No Matter Who and all that mattered was getting to 51 seats for the Democrats in the Senate
is not zero.
If you ever forgave Platner for the Nazi tattoo and the rape fantasies and the allegations of assault and the imperialist mercenary work—even before the rape accusation—then you have no business, for even a moment, expressing confusion as to how anyone could support someone like Trump.
I sent my aunt, the doctor,
an article on “the disturbing rise
of cancer cases
in Millennials and Gen Z,”
that suggests the cause
is that people are aging faster,
and in response
my aunt sent me a study
on how Covid infections
can accelerate epigenetc aging.
🎤💕 Hannah Montana Linux, the Disney Channel-themed Linux distribution, is back based on Debian 13.5 and Linux kernel 6.12. It features a KDE Plasma 6 desktop environment, a lighter LXQt edition for older systems, and still a lot of pink!
https://alternativeto.net/news/2026/7/hannah-montana-linux-has-been-revived-with-a-modernized-stack-but-still-a-lot-of-pink-/
>Wondering if the fediverse - and Mastodon in particular - is undergoing a major spam / bot signup wave at the moment
Yes, broadly and consistently.
> I wonder if #agenticAI has anything to do with the uptick in suspicious, bot-like accounts
Yes, broadly and consistently.
It is overwhelming some servers and some moderators, and many more are just tired of dealing with it.
IFTAS needs to hear from admins and moderators in the annual survey:
Yesterday was a sad day for the privacy of citizens in the EU given the extension of #ChatControl 1.0, allowing for voluntary scanning of private communications.
In light of yesterday's vote, we wanted to remind you that: Chat Control 1.0 is different from Chat Control 2.0 in that providers (like us at Tuta) are not forced to backdoor their end-to-end encryption for surveillance.
People pushing oil and gas policies are global terrorists.
You can even take the “he” out of it—Elon Musk will not live to see one million humans settled on Mars, by SpaceX or anyone else.
'Elon Musk will get a billion shares of SpaceX if he can settle a million humans on Mars.’
https://fortune.com/2026/06/22/elon-musk-billion-shares-spacex-settle-million-humans-mars-colony/