Guatemala is ready and willing to receive about 150 unaccompanied children of all ages each week from the United States, the country’s president has said,
a day after a US federal judge halted the deportation of 10 Guatemalan children.
Those children had already boarded a plane when a court responded to an emergency appeal on Sunday.
They were later returned to the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement.
On Monday, Guatemala’s president, Bernardo Arévalo, told j…
New podcast just dropped.
Well, it dropped in June, but I just found out about it. I've listened to the first episode and I hope it's successful because it's doing such important work.
This podcast is about child sexual abuse in the LDS church. The information is presented in a clear way with empathy towards survivors and with the legal details that show just how liable the LDS church is and how its influence on
C04 - Dawn of the Gods
THAARN: [V.O.] Do you remember stories they told you about me? When you were a little girl on Auron? Do you remember the children's rhymes? The songs you sang about the Thaarn? [Tarrant and Dayna talk behind this]
CALLY: I remember.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/304/127…
Two stanzas from a song improvised by Stan Stewart after hearing about the murder and maiming of children in another mass shooting.
#poem #lyrics
https://
The Education Department has cut off funding for campus-based child care at over a dozen colleges,
accusing the schools of conflicting with the Trump administration’s polices by teaching young children about gender and race or prioritizing diversity in hiring.
Grants from the Child Care Access Means Parents in School (CCAMPIS) program are a critical source of money for public colleges that educate large populations of students with limited financial means.
The $80 million …
You know what truly annoys me?
Well, a lot of things, but here I'm thinking of people who enjoy killing little creatures.
And I'm not talking about killing some animal because it's actually dangerous, or is causing some real harm, or even because it stings painfully or is annoying like a fly. I'm talking about people who laugh when they kill a spider or a "bug" (which usually means some harmless beetle), because it dared show in their homestead.
Not to mention all the people who would prefer that all the harmless Polish snakes (and slow worms, because if it has no legs, then it's obviously a "snake") or they'll "bite the children".
Love the positioning of the journos' names on this article!
Melania Trump says she hopes to become the First Lady of Technology as she leads the Presidential AI Challenge to inspire children and teachers to embrace AI (Miranda Devine/New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/08/25/opinion/
Think in Games: Learning to Reason in Games via Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models
Yi Liao, Yu Gu, Yuan Sui, Zining Zhu, Yifan Lu, Guohua Tang, Zhongqian Sun, Wei Yang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21365
One thing I've thought about many times, there needs to be a way to talk about a situation where a person can't prove criminal misconduct based on the known facts alone, but also... there's no way you'd let that creep near your children either.
#ScottThoughts
Security measures for Gen #AI seem to increase all around, which is overall good.
It's just sad to think about WHY statements like "Gemini 2.5 Flash Image does not currently support editing images of children" are necessary in the first place.
#nanobanana
Sounds like code, if you ask me (I think she's his handler)
Melania Trump pens letter to Putin raising concerns about children
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5456305-melania-trump-pens-letter-to-putin-raising-concerns-about-children/
@… It’s a company that takes USA VC money and spends it on children in the UK. I can’t get mad about that!
I learned¹ about the Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature² that has more than 10000 books scanned and available online. Just great.
It is hosted by the University of Florida. So let's hope that it stays available, i.e. that the Republicans don't find the old children's books from 1750 to woke.³
__
¹via
How much of my children's future is AI going to burn up? That depends on how much we feed the hype beast. *That* is why "don't use AI at all without mentioning the drawbacks & a very good reason" is my stance (and I'm an AI researcher, technically).
Local models that run on your laptop: acceptable if produced by ethical means (including data sourcing & compensation for data filtering) & training costs are mitigated. Are such models way worse than the huge datacenter-scale models? Yes, for now. Deal with it.
ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, even DeepSeek: get out. You're feeding the beast that is consuming my kids' future. Heck, even talking up these models or about how "everyone is using them so it's okay" or about "they're not going away" I'd feeding the beast even if you don't touch them.
I wish it weren't like this, because the capabilities of the big models are cool even once you cut past the hype.
#AI
"A society under “number go up” tends towards evil. The men and women behind an excessively high rate of return often make deeply sinful and immoral choices, little different than the Confederate plantation owners did in whipping slaves or lords in castles did when abusing serfs. That they do it with spreadsheets doesn’t make it better. (We even use old terminology: I know of several people in a large health insurance conglomerate who set policies to deny care whose nickname is “the three witches.”)
And that’s why Jeff Epstein’s story is so compelling, it expresses this evil in a way that we all understand. On Sunday, I wrote about the oddness of the story, how an elite sex trafficker convicted of procuring children as prostitutes was friends or associates with everyone from Trump to Bill Clinton to Larry Summers to Bill Gates. Epstein represents how elites live in one moral universe where evil bacchanalia is rampant, while the rest of us live in a different more normal one. Every society has elites, and there are always weird things that elites do. But America, and the West, have reached a point where there is increasingly deep resentment and cynicism about this divide."
#USPolitcs #EconomicInequality
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-number-go-up-rule-why-america
The fascists doing these razzia's don't care at all about children, even regardless of the legal status of their family members.
Having a studio near a piano teacher's studio makes me realise how most kids don't practice this instrument at all, just come and struggle through the same boring tunes every week.
Please don't make your children learn an instrument they don't actual enjoy playing, it's a counter-productive waste of time.
All that stuff about classical music making kids more intelligent is pure nonsense, either experimental results don't replicate or replicate just as we…
Catching Dark Signals in Algorithms: Unveiling Audiovisual and Thematic Markers of Unsafe Content Recommended for Children and Teenagers
Haoning Xue, Brian Nishimine, Martin Hilbert, Drew Cingel, Samantha Vigil, Jane Shawcroft, Arti Thakur, Zubair Shafiq, Jingwen Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12571
Internet Matters survey of 1,000 UK kids aged 9 to 17: 67% say they use AI chatbots regularly; of that group, 35% say it feels like talking to a friend (Noor Al-Sibai/Futurism)
https://futurism.com/lonely-children-ai-chatbots
I Come To Bury, Not to Praise
James Dobson’s teachings left deep scars—fractured families, rejected children, and faith distorted by cruelty. His legacy raises hard questions about love, justice, and how Christians should treat “the least of these.”
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/i-come-to
There's a podcast playing apparently about these children who were stuck in that cave, and this story will always be connected in my mind to Elon brainstorming about a mini submarine he wanted to build to rescue them and then calling the diver hero who actually saved them a pedo for being underwhelmed by the idea. That was such fun.
Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
TARRANT: Listen, Orac, what about the disease epidemic Cally's talking about.
ORAC: It's a high probability that because Auron has had a policy of neutrality and isolation, the planet has now been kept completely free of all disease for more than three decades.
https://blake.tor…
The State Department announced this weekend that it is
suspending visitor visas for Palestinians from Gaza to enter the U.S.
after right wingers raged about children entering the country to receive medical care
— often for injuries caused by Israel with the U.S.’s backing.
“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitaria…
This weekend I listened to the 'How to Age Up' podcast on climate change. A lot of good observations for how parents can help their children process the daily news cycle and manage their anxiety about the future.
Turns out one effective strategy is one I keep hearing from so many different sources - you build community. Building community makes communities more resilient. Building community makes you feel less alone - so you can help do the work to combat climate change/racism/…
How much can children see and report about their experience of a brief glance at a natural scene? https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/a5ykj_v1
Study extendable to 3-year-olds? Thinking of Mike May: normal vision up to age 3 (children of that age get around fine by eyesight), y…
Need to talk to your students about AI ethics this fall? I've uploaded a course module for the AI IMPACT RISK framework, with interactive website, video, infographics, and quiz, that you can import into your own courseware
This imscc file can be imported directly into Canvas/Brightspace/Blackboard, or you can cherrypick resources directly from the IMPACT RISK website. Also new: SVG versions of all graphics
My great failure in life is that I never put myself in a position to monetise being this embarrassingly incompetent.
#auspol #australia #government
Liberals would rather go to a peaceful candle light vigil for children who have had their parents stolen from them than brick a cop who's stealing parents away from their kids, and they wonder why all their politicians "are so concerned" about Gaza but aren't willing to actually do anything to stop arms shipments to Israel.
#USPol
Folks in NZ are starting to realise the implications of the impending EOL of Microsoft Windows 10 for our education system. In its finite wisdom, our MinOfEd has effectively locked all schools into either the use of MS Windows or Google ChromeOS. Both have fundamental issues like endless license hassles, EOLing OSs, ending support for Window or ChromeOS on specific computer models, etc. And that doesn't even start to talk about digital colonisation & sovereignty (see
Art Adventures, our free summer program for camps, community centers and day cares, is chugging along. Want to learn more about it and what makes this year's program special? https://georgiamuseum.org/gmoa_blog/this-summers-art-adventures-imm…
Started watching Presence after seeing a few recommendations for it. I'm not usually into straight up ghosty type flicks but this one's done in a fairly unique way. Digging it.
#movies
It's been ages since I posted any donkey content. So here's a still from a short film from the early 60s about Philippe, a 5 year-old boy imagining what it would be like to live the story his mother reads to him. The film is held by the Archives de Montréal.
"Philippe au Jardin des merveilles" (1963?)
https://youtu.be/8GNhvU…
alright im going through my old files again and rediscovered a shitty unfinished sci-fi epic poem thing i was writing sometime when i was 14/15/idfk. all i remember about it is that it was gonna keep doing this countdown and changing structure accordingly for a really long time, i was thinking of depicting the character finding love in an ethereal sorta way for the ending, and it was gonna incorporate a enochian number square for some reason.
TL;DR:
Observational study found DTP correlated to higher short term (~2y) death rates in children.
1. The original study was small (n=1000) and methodologically weak.
2. An attempt to reproduce the study failed to show any corelation.
3. It was 40 years ago, using the old DTP vax which has been redesigned/reformulated extensively.
That man would have people dying of lockjaw to weed out the weak.
In This Thread: denizens of debian-user mailing list who refuse to accept that there are people who do creative work without wanting to use email.
Apparently it is only "kids" who "don't understand what is important", who "have a mobile phone glued to their hand" and "don't care about their computer as long as it plays their games."
Words matter. Explicit images of children document heinous crimes against children. We need to choose our words carefully when we talk about such things.
https://www.bobmuellerwriter.com/you-keep-using-that-word/
Stakeholder Perspectives on Humanistic Implementation of Computer Perception in Healthcare: A Qualitative Study
Kristin M. Kostick-Quenet (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030, USA), Meghan E. Hurley (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030, USA), Syed Ayaz (Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030, USA), John Herrington (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA), Casey Zampella (Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, P…
It amazes me that people still claim that Israel's actions are entirely about defense, or hostages.
“The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations. For everything that happened on October 7, for every person on October 7, 50 Palestinians need to die. It does not matter now if they are children. I am not speaking from revenge. I am speaking to future generations. They need a Nakba from time to time to feel the price. There is no…
The people who want to censor the Internet because 'think of the children' are most likely same the people on a certain list for doing more than thinking about them
When women on the train are talking about their children staying up late, then themselves having to get up, turn the lights off and lock the doors behind them, and you're realize you're in the same situation… except, in your case it's the parents staying up late.
Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs,
the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it.
Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food
—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week
—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations.
Within weeks, two of those sources told me, the food, meant for c…
Series C, Episode 07 - Children of Auron
C.A. TWO: What about the genetic tissue? There are five thousand on standby for immediate dispatch.
TARRANT: Five thousand? All uninfected?
C.A. ONE: Yes, of course.
AVON: How can you be sure?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/307/356
An influential US medical journal
👉is rejecting a call from the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr,
to retract a large Danish study that found that aluminum ingredients in vaccines do not increase health risks for children,
the journal’s editor told Reuters.
⚠️ Kennedy has long promoted doubts about vaccines’ safety and efficacy,
and as health secretary has upended the federal government’s process for recommending immun…
White House boasts family of suspect in Boulder attack 'could be deported as early as tonight'
The White House is boasting on its official social media accounts about the arrests of
the wife and five children of
Mohamed Sabry Soliman,
the suspected Boulder attacker, who were taken into custody on Tuesday.
Soliman’s six family members,
“have been captured and are now in ICE custody for expedited removal”,
a White House post says.
It adds…
AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI
@cdarwin@c.im
