I made a little bug !!

Do the AI people know that the rest of us who never got on the bandwagon are still doing everything the same way we always have

Niu Lai has not made its way onto tumblr yet so I guess my anglophone ass has to make a post about it

something I want to say as a personal statement, speaking for me, Shelby Donahue:

It always troubles me when people talk about trans women (like Meagan and Autumn Hill, my partners who I talk to every day) in men's prisons, describing them as "rape concentration camps" and emphasizing the sexual violence there. Both Meagan and Autumn Hill have told me, explicitly, that the vast majority of their fellow prisoners respect them and respect their gender, and while some prisoners have been threatening (particularly to Meagan), that the violence against them has primarily come from the institutional systems of the guards, wardens, etc. I know this in part because of their actions: Meagan and Autumn Hill have consistently helped their fellow prisoners, with little things like getting artwork to help a prisoner draw a birthday card for his child, or bigger things like helping someone get back in contact with their family. And a lot of prisoners have been supportive to Meagan and Autumn Hill, especially when they know about the Prairieland case. They make snacks to share, trade books, and comfort Meagan when she's feeling particularly sad.

I say all this for two reasons. The first is that prisoners are not all rapists or bigots, and in fact many of them are not even guilty of the crimes they're arrested for. They're an oppressed class of people, even the worst of them, and they deserve to be understood as individuals, not a nameless and faceless mass of violent threats. And, as individuals, a lot of them have been good comrades to Meagan and Autumn Hill. I want people to keep that in mind when thinking about prisoners. There's a lot of racial stereotypes and bigotries in the way people think of prisoners in the USA, and we need to unlearn those things and understand prisoners as people, as our equals.

The second reason is that you, and me, and everyone we know may end up in jail, or prison. I think about that a lot - getting raided by the FBI will have that effect on you. If we end up in prison, we have to understand the risks and dangers realistically, without excessive fear or unrealistic optimism. And I think it's important people know the facts about what prison is like, and what prisoners are like. Not everyone is violent in prison - but everyone there is the victim of a lot of violence. There are potential friends and allies everywhere.

Everything used to be 20 dollars and now that I finally have 20 dollars everything is now 200 dollars

im so excited for GTA6 i hope it is so bad that it wounds western AAA devs for a decade

The sooner you start, the sooner you'll be done with it and the sooner you can stop thinking about it. Go on, up you get, it won't be as bad as you think.

One of my favorite things to write as an author is what I'm going to call a semi-productive conversation. aka a conversation where two characters who don't see eye to eye both completely fail to make their point– either speaking past each other or just lying straight through their teeth– but in the process one of them manages to come to some kind of realization about the other. Then, during the next disastrous conversation, that earlier realization gives them some pause and makes them say something different, leading the other to get their own small moment of understanding. You repeat this ad infinitum until after 50K words they finally have a talk that actually fucking goes somewhere.

Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

1. There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.
2. Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.

Thank you @just-call-me-zinnia for finding it!

use this map whenever a white northerner starts talking about california, the southwest, or the south with derision or scorn

Thinking about 13 Latvias again