A magistrate judge in the ongoing copyright suit against OpenAI has ordered them to turn over a sample of 20 million private chat logs from ChatGPT users to plaintiffs, stating that the protective order baring lawyers from leaking the contents and OpenAI’s own “de-identification” of the logs should be sufficient to protect these user’s privacy. […]
OpenAI required to divulge 20M private chat logs Read More »
Tom Lehrer worked at the NSA from 1955 through 1957, and a recent thread on BlueSky reveals one of the papers he wrote while there included a bibliographical entry for “Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrizations of Infinitely Differentiable Remannian Manifolds” by Lobachevsky. Apparently the joke went unnoticed for almost 60 years. [via
Tom Lehrer Easter Egg in NSA Publication Read More »
I started playing Magic The Gathering when I was at Stanford back in early 1994, and introduced it to my high school friends when I went back to Atlanta that summer. One of those friends was Jay Schneider, who has this amazing habit of taking up a hobby and turning it into something world-class, so
History of the Sligh / Geeba deck in MTG Read More »
I just heard Tom Lehrer died yesterday at the age of 97. I first heard of Tom Lehrer reading the lyrics to The Hunting Song in one of my Dad’s old Mad Magazines, though like many of my generation I didn’t realize he was the same guy who sang Silent E, L-Y and a bunch
Remembering Tom Lehrer Read More »
Kaiser Permanente just announced that as of August 29th they will stop offering gender-affirming surgeries for patients under the age of nineteen, following a similar pause by Stanford Medicine announced last month. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal funding to institutions that provide gender-affirming care of any kind, and a few weeks ago
Kaiser pauses gender-affirming surgeries for patients under nineteen Read More »
As the latest term of the Supreme Court mercifully comes to an end, here’s your occasional reminder that the current court is illegitimate. Not because senate Republicans blocked any nomination by a Democratic president from even coming to a vote, or because Justice Thomas was caught red-handed soliciting and accepting undisclosed bribes gifts to remain
Reminder that the Roberts Court is illegitimate… Read More »
My seven-year-old daughter hasn’t gotten into chapter books yet, even for bedtime stories, but she absolutely loves graphic novels. One of her favorite authors / cartoonists is San Francisco native Raina Telgemeier, whose graphic novels have become my go-to for bedtime reading after she invariably loses interest in whatever book I wanted to read after
The Cartoonists Club Read More »
You may have heard that about a month ago scientists at Berkeley and UW announced they have “discovered” a new never-before-seen color, which they call olo. (Here’s a quick video overview from their paper.) Before I get into what they did, here’s a quick refresher on how we see color. White light is made up
The argument: If you let trans women use public restrooms that match their gender identity then men will claim to be trans women so they can ogle, harass and/or sexually assault women. The reality: Harassment, sexual assault and invasion of privacy is already illegal, and incidents of harassment didn’t increase in places that passed non-discrimination
The tip of the spear: bathroom bans Read More »
The argument: The arguments against trans women playing in women’s sports runs the gamut between “trans women have an unfair advantage because of natal testosterone when they were younger” to Trump’s position that “trans women are actually men who are either delusional or lying to get an unfair advantage”. There’s also a secondary argument that
The tip of the spear: trans women in women’s sports Read More »