this is definitely going to be fodder for Fox News headlines and Bill Maher jokes and similar bullshit

but, here’s a link to the actual full text of what they passed: https://seattle.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=8175165&GUID=01C70EAD-3964-4E26-8DDF-E42FD2C8AB8F&FullText=1

there’s a preamble and various other shit, but the bulk of what they passed is just updating this single paragraph. additions in bold:

“Sexual orientation” means actual or perceived male or female heterosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality, asexuality, or homosexuality and includes a person’s attitudes, preferences, beliefs, and practices pertaining thereto. For the purposes of this definition, “attitudes, preferences, beliefs, and practices pertaining thereto” includes actual or perceived consensual relationships involving multiple partners such as non-monogamous relationships.

that’s it. that’s basically all they changed. removed “male or female” (I’m guessing it was added decades ago to make explicit that it applied to both gay men and lesbian women), added pan and ace, and added one sentence about non-monogamous relationships.

if there’s a bigoted boss who overhears two of his employees talking, and one of them said “I’m gay”, firing that person for being gay is clearly illegal.

if that same boss overheard an employee say “I’m pansexual” and then fired them for it, that’s also illegal, under any reasonable interpretation of the existing anti-discrimination law.

but we’re not dealing with reasonable people, we’re dealing with bigots. so inevitably, one of them would have tried to drag out a court case trying to argue that firing someone for being pansexual was actually legal because it wasn’t spelled out in the law.

likewise if you have 3 people renting a house from a bigoted landlord. he assumes they’re roommates, finds out they’re a throuple, and tries to evict them because of it. now it’s 100% explicit (the legal term here is “black-letter” law) that non-monogamy is protected, instead of having to rely on interpretation.

the intent of the law is completely unchanged - if you have a bigoted boss, or landlord, they can’t fire you or evict you or otherwise punish you, just because they “object to your lifestyle” or whatever other fucking euphemism they want to use.

I was a little disappointed that there weren’t more variables accounted for regarding the participants

I think it’s even worse than that. quoting from the study’s abstract:

In Study 1, participants (1,682 adults recruited from Prolific)

…

In Studies 2 and 3, participants (905 adults recruited from Prolific)

hadn’t heard of Profilic before, they describe themselves as:

“Prolific connects researchers, AI developers and product teams with real people who take part in studies online. It’s built for collecting high-quality, human data quickly and reliably, from training AI models to running behavioral research. Every participant is vetted, active and fairly paid, so you get trustworthy results without the usual noise.”

so the common theme is that 100% of the study participants have opted-in to this “help evaluate AI as a paid side-hustle” thing. that is going to introduce a huge selection bias that is definitely not representative of the population as a whole.

“don’t build the torment nexus” is a meme that’s repeated so often it’s becoming a cliche, and yet

Ankh-Morpork no longer had a fire brigade. The citizens had a rather disturbingly direct way of thinking at times, and it did not take long for people to see the rather obvious flaw in paying a group of people by the number of fires they put out. The penny really dropped shortly after Charcoal Tuesday.

from a Terry Pratchett book published in 1997.

those who forget history are condemned to…something something.

using an AI chatbot is “dabbling in computer science” in the same way that playing Operation in your dorm common room is “dabbling in med school”

not normally a fan of Raw Story, but I like that their headline frames this fucking thing correctly.

this is the “GOP megadonor Brian Heywood thinks your 5 year old girl needs a genital exam before she can play soccer with her friends” act of 2026.

regardless of whatever else you think about AI, it’s a good idea to be very wary about security-sensitive apps that are written using LLMs.

there’s a self-hostable S3 replacement called RustFS, with development that leans heavily on LLMs.

they had a security vulnerabilty last year.

one LLM-written commit added a complete authentication bypass to the code. literally, you could just send rustfs rpc as the auth token instead of an actual token.

it was fixed in a pull request named fix: Prevent panic in GetMetrics gRPC handler on invalid input which claimed to fix a different auth problem and just coincidentally removed the hardcoded auth token.

security stuff is hard, and LLMs are prone to over-confidence. that’s a bad combo.

good fucking riddance. the news about his Nazi tattoo dropped in October of last year, and some of the world’s most gullible rubes still believed in him.

following sexual assault allegations

“sexual assault” encompasses a large category of behavior. so let’s be real specific here: Platner is a fucking rapist.

the news needs to toss “alleged” in there, but I don’t.

quoting from Politico which broke the story, in spoiler tags because the details are upsetting:

and even after this came out, some people were still defending him.

make a list of those people.

do not listen to any opinion they have, ever again, for the rest of their lives.

do not let them near your children.

do not leave your drink unattended around them.

in which he angrily accused the Democratic establishment and corporate media

well golly gee I’m shocked that the rapist is getting angry and lashing out when confronted with the consequences of his own actions. no one could have seen that coming.

the best encapsulation of this is a tweet from Ilan Wurman:

A year and a half ago a federal judge in Washington basically said the Trump Administration view was borderline sanctionable. That view just got 4 votes on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Wurman is a right-wing nutjob law prof at U of MN, and is essentially the main guy providing academic legal justification for Trump’s attempt to dismantle the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.

In his dissent in Trump v. Barbara, Justice Clarence Thomas cited Wurman’s scholarship three times.

he lost. his position only got 4 votes. and yet that tweet is him doing a victory lap - he’s bragging about “even though I lost, look how much I was able to accomplish in 18 months”.

Anthropic: Claude learned

yeah I’m gonna stop you right there

“schools have a bunch of structural problems that should be fixed” - yes, agreed 1000%

“schools have a bunch of structural problems that should be fixed, and therefore schools shouldn’t ban phones until the structural problems are fixed” - nope. that’s a complete non-sequitur.

“fix structural problems with schools” is a gigantic undertaking. it’s absolutely worth doing, but it’s the kind of thing that will take many many years, and effort across many many different fronts. it’s not like Congress can pass the Fix Structural Problems In Schools Act of 2026 this summer and then starting this September schools are now fixed.

“you can’t do that small change until the all the larger problems are fixed” ends up being essentially a thought-terminating cliche.

As an aside, is the Guardian becoming a shit rag? Lately (last year or two) I’ve noticed a huge dip in their quality.

what I’ve heard previously is that the Guardian’s UK edition sucks, and that the US edition is somewhat better, but at this point I’m comfortable lumping them together.

the article that flipped the “assume everything they publish is bullshit” switch for me was Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says from a few months ago.

it’s written with the tone you’d expect from “serious” journalism:

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.

but if you read carefully…it’s tweets. it’s just fucking tweets. they released a “study” that is a graph of “tweets over time” and claimed that it says something about the prevalence of AI “going rogue”.

and in particular, they take the one story about the Meta executive who allowed an AI “agent” to delete all their emails, notice that there’s a bunch of tweets discussing it, and conflate that with an increased occurrence of it happening.

it’s the equivalent of saying that there were 10,000 moon landings in 1969 because you looked back at newspaper archives and found 10,000 “man lands on moon” headlines. just complete fucking amateur hour data analysis, and for the Guardian to publish it uncritically is shameful.

it gets even stupider than that:

We acknowledge funding from Arnold Ventures

an American company that is the philanthropic vehicle of billionaires John D. Arnold and Laura Arnold

who is this John Arnold guy anyway…let’s see…and…oh

since February 2024, is a member of the board of directors of Meta.

oh, and fun fact, it’s not even a real fucking charity:

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation was initially created as a philanthropic organization, but was restructured as a limited liability company and renamed Arnold Ventures in January 2019. The organization’s LLC structure is intended to allow it to operate with more flexibility.

so he’s on the board of directors for Meta, which among other things owns Instagram…and he has a side business that pretends to be a charity even though it’s not, and it funds publication of a “study” saying no, teenagers having cell phones 24/7 is totally fine actually.

the tobacco industry used to pay people to wear white lab coats and say cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. it’s tempting to think of ourselves as more savvy than they were, and look back in hindsight and say “how could people have fallen for such obvious bullshit?”

well…

reminder that in the 2020 primary, Kamala Harris got zero votes.

not zero convention delegates - zero. fucking. votes.

Citing a lack of funds, Harris officially withdrew her candidacy on December 3, 2019.

she dropped out of the race a full two months before the Iowa caucuses because no one liked her.

much like Biden only has national-level name recognition and popularity because he was chosen as Obama’s VP, Harris is a absolute nobody also-ran except she was in the right place at the right time to be picked as Biden’s VP.

there’s no chance in hell she wins the Democratic primary, but she’s going to float the possibility anyway because it allows her to fundraise a few million bucks in the next couple years. it’s a half-decent grift if you can make it work.

hopefully someone forks off a decent kernel

uhhh…do you have any idea how much effort would be involved in maintaining a fork of the Linux kernel, just to preserve 486 support?

this feels like a valuable door to keep open

it’s not.

it’s a vanishingly small install base, because of how slow and limited those chips are. the 486 had a whopping 1.2 million transistors. compare that to the big list on this wikipedia page. a few that stand out:

• Playstation 2 (2003) had 53 million
• Intel Core 2 Duo (2008) had 230 million
• Apple A7 (2013) used in the iPhone 5S and iPad Air had 1 billion

transistor count isn’t an exact proxy for performance, but with those orders of magnitude it puts into perspective just how underpowered that little 486 is going to be, for anything you might try to do with it in 2026.

an original, first-generation Raspberry Pi will absolutely run circles around a 486. same with going to ebay or a local pawn shop / computer refurbisher and buying the absolute oldest/cheapest used laptop you can find.

for people who already have 486s and really want to keep them going, the current Debian release still supports 486, and it’s supported until 2028 - meaning you have 2 more years of continuing to receive security updates and theoretically being safe to connect it to the internet.

and even after that, FreeBSD has “tier 2” support for 386 and higher, and NetBSD supports it as “tier 1”

and of course, nothing stops anyone from running an old kernel on their old hardware.

conspiracy-brained people are all seizing on this as evidence that supports whatever conspiracy theory they already believed about Kirk’s killing.

but really, this is not surprising at all. from 2022: The Field of Firearms Forensics Is Flawed: The matching of bullets to guns is subjective, and courts are starting to question it because of testimony from scientific experts

Skepticism of firearms identification is not new. A 2009 National Research Council (NRC) report criticized the firearms identification field as lacking “a precisely defined process.” Guidelines from the Association of Firearm and Tool Mark Examiners (AFTE) allow examiners to declare a match between a bullet or cartridge case and a particular firearm “when the unique surface contours of two toolmarks are in ‘sufficient agreement.’” According to the guidelines, sufficient agreement is the condition in which the comparison “exceeds the best agreement demonstrated between tool marks known to have been produced by different tools and is consistent with the agreement demonstrated by tool marks known to have been produced by the same tool.” In other words, the criterion for a life-shaping decision is based not on quantitative standards but on the examiner’s subjective experience.

also, pay attention to the wording:

could not conclusively connect a bullet fragment recovered during Charlie Kirk’s autopsy to the rifle

they’re not saying they concluded there’s no link between the bullet and the rifle. they’re saying they can’t conclude there is a link. absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

the actual news here is simply that his defense attorneys asked for a delay to the trial, so that they have time to prepare to rebut all the possible evidence the prosecution might present.

park it in the Strait of Hormuz you cowards

military concepts like “standoff” and “beyond visual range” were invented by woke Marxist generals who were afraid of getting their hands dirty

the Ford is a gigantic ship, Iran only has small wittle boats. they’ll definitely run away and be scared of it.

to some extent, this is “yeah, everyone knows they’ve given arrest quotas, and told to use bullshit AI apps that fabricate arrest reasons” - but it’s still important, for the historical record if nothing else, to have contemporaneous, under-oath statements about it.

In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day.

…

JB testified that officers had started the day by surveilling an apartment complex. He suggested officers choose the location in part based on intelligence from an app called Elite. It’s unclear the exact role Elite played in identifying the area as a target – another officer testified that the ICE field office in Portland had provided “intelligence” that led them to visit the site. But JB explained that Elite was a “newer app” given to ICE agents. The app, he said, is “kind of like Google Maps” and shows how many individuals with an “immigration nexus” are believed to be in a certain area. Another officer testified that a “nexus” could mean any history of contact with immigration officials, which could include a naturalized US citizen.

yep, absolutely. this reeks of desperation and an overly-rushed attempt at ratfucking Kat.

this only made the news because one person (Amanda Informed) got sent the offer, and decided to tell a journalist about it rather than simply accept or decline it.

the lesson that they’re going to take from this is not “don’t use influencers to ratfuck candidates” it’s “be more cautious about which influencers you try to recruit”

someone who is likely LGBTQ

…

this likely trans girl

oh hell no cut this shit out right now.

the person in these ads has, AFAICT, not said anything about their gender or sexuality.

this is a random person in an ad you saw on the internet. speculating about what genitals they were born with, or who they like to fuck, is fucking creepy. don’t do it.

(and no, there is no “oh, but if my speculation were true it’d be a heartwarming story” exception)

But, damn, some times you gotta look for a little light.

yeah shit sucks right now, but that’s a reason why we need more critical thinking, not less of it.

falling for, and spreading, obvious propaganda like this does not make the world any better.

from the article:

She’s been making videos highlighting her job at Staples since the end of January and has blown up big time.

wow yeah the end of January huh? did anything else happen on TikTok around the end of January?

Her engaging videos showcase little-known Staples services, boosting customer interest and store traffic.

…

There are some businesses that have been around since we were children and are fixtures in our everyday lives. Staples is one of those brands; while we might not have daily needs for things at the office supply retailer, we know it’s there in case we do.

…

Even if you haven’t seen her videos on your For You Page (FYP), you’ve most likely seen videos analyzing how effective she’s been at promoting this company or maybe even videos of people going to Staples for projects and saving a ton of time and money, thanks to her.

holy sponcon batman