Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

"Lensa’s fetish for Asian women is so strong that I got female nudes and sexualized poses even when I directed the app to generate avatars of me as a male."

Brilliant story from Melissa Heikkilä at Technology Review about how portrait-making AI Lensa -- which uses stable diffusion -- created sexualized drawings when prompted with photos of the author, who is an Asian woman.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/12/12/1064751/the-viral-ai-avatar-app-lensa-undressed-me-without-my-consent/

“You can find us anywhere you get your podcasts.”

I *adore* this phrase, because it has been like two whole-ass decades and not one single venture capital darling has managed to unseat plain RSS as the distribution method for podcasts. Not one. (And they have really tried!)

Podcasts are just out there, like air. You don’t go to one place to get them; you get them from everywhere and anywhere. You can choose how you want to engage with them and manage them and it is legitimately heartwarming that nothing has ever gotten in the way of that being a fundamental fact.

This is the best of what the web is. It will never have a stock ticker or even a marketing scheme. Most people don’t even know it is there. But it endures (past the many, many attempts by squillionaire corporates to kill it) because of its absolute unshakable utility.

My suggestion: any time you hear “anywhere you get your podcasts”, send a little thanks to RSS for keeping the real web alive.

#RSS #Podcasts #ProtocolsNotProducts

Folks, I'm an editor at #Conservation Biology and we are actively soliciting research papers that focus on "Diversifying Conservation" We want to create a special issue highlighting research from diverse voices, research that highlights #diversity (broadly defined) in conservation, and submissions that may be centered in non-western epistemologies. Abstracts due mid Feb, with research papers at the end of March. Hit me up for more details

@malwaretech

I'm happy to announce we have this new article in Nature, discussing policies and challenges for a just transition. "Degrowth can work - here's how science can help": https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04412-x

Musk doing the fake pronouns thing to mock trans people and siding with anti-vaxxers in the same tweet is incredibly disturbing. The people ignoring this because they think he's a genius even more so.

Neuromancer 2022

The collapse of a startup leaves implanted medical devices in > 700 people

The unavailability of the proprietary SW needed to recalibrate the devices and maintain its effectiveness, and the draining of batteries, will leave them without treatment and with HW implanted in their bodies

They have to hack their own implants

And it is not an isolated case but a trend

https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-022-03810-5/index.html

If your belief is that a bunch of kids should stop biking and scooting so you can drive over 40 mph on a city street, you are definitely the asshole.

Today was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.

This morning Elon Musk tweeted that his pronouns were prosecute/Fauci.

You can’t study evolutionary biology under the roof of the Discovery Institute and you can’t have meaningful and productive scientific collaboration on a platform run by right-wing troll who denies science when its results are inconvenient to him and just simply to hear his audience cheer.

This is my favorite pic from a visit to the Bata Shoe Museum in #Toronto. It's a clog from Auvergne, France, that was used to remove the spiny burr from chestnuts. #Fagacea #botany #shoes #fashion

@dhoe There's a lot to #solarpunk that isn't expressed in the AI generated imagery (much of which does just depict greenwashing) that are often associated with the concept.

Walkable cities are solarpunk, so is the #RightToRepair movement, repair cafes, composting food waste, planting native wildflowers on underutilized land, & even public libraries.

Pretty much any sustainable practice carried out equitably can be solarpunk, especially if communities are developed/strengthened in the process!

330 million year old perfection - a wee crinoid ossicle that beautifully highlights their five-fold (pentaradial) symmetry. There’s also a tiny fragment of bryozoan in the bottom right 🖤
#ScottishFossils #ScottishGeology #Palaeontology

@dhoe @gus @SolarpunkPrompts if you want another perspective, Solarpunk is another dramatical lens to look through:

In superhero movies, tech is always an artifact, to be used as a weapon.

In cyberpunk, tech is a means of control or rebellion. Nothing in-between. You cannot imagine Wikipedia.

In Solarpunk tech is empowering communities, its infrastructure.

My take on Musk's trajectory over the last four weeks. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/elon-musk-and-the-narcissism-radicalization-maelstrom/sharetoken/Zs4zc5BXA9Et

Tiny dots on an endless timeline.. some wee carboniferous crinoids for #FossilFriday 🖤

the garden is my church

#garden #iris

I keep seeing people say Mastodon is nothing like Twitter. And they’re right.

Mastodon is an echo of the old internet, it’s decentralised, chaotic. What you get depends on your sysadmin. You can’t search, everything has to be shared to you by a human. Networks split apart and rejoin. What you see is your unique connection to it.

Is this good? Maybe. But for me that’s the internet I grew up with. No algorithms, no targeted adverts, just human interaction, and it was glorious.

In 1974, a sovereign Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) community was declared at an abandoned girl scout camp in the Adirondacks. After a tense 3-year stand off, New York State agreed to an unprecedented 600-acre land swap. To this day, Ganienkeh maintains its sovereignty. It isn't a reservation doesn't seek US recognition. It's one of the greatest #LandBack successes in recent history, and yet is also largely forgotten by settlers even locally.

In #JapaneseFolklore iwana bozu are char (a type of river fish) who grow to an enormous size and transform into #yokai. They're able to shapeshift into human form, dress in Buddhist priest's robes, walk and talk. Mostly they approach people who are fishing in rivers to ask them to stop, and to avoid needless killing and to take only what they need. Most people think they're priests and don't consider the possibility of them being yokai until after they've left.
#folklore #japodon
🎨Matthew Meyer