Tootfinder

How is it 2025 and a prominent Democrat brings up the fake “trans people in sports” debate again?
There is not such thing. People don’t change their gender to maybe win a few medals.
Just fuck off.

Some good venting by Steve Klabnik about the sorry state of significant chunks of the AI debate today:
"What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true."

Filters of Identity: AR Beauty and the Algorithmic Politics of the Digital Body
Miriam Doh, Corinna Canali, Nuria Oliver
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.19611 h…

Filters of Identity: AR Beauty and the Algorithmic Politics of the Digital Body
This position paper situates AR beauty filters within the broader debate on Body Politics in HCI. We argue that these filters are not neutral tools but technologies of governance that reinforce racialized, gendered, and ableist beauty standards. Through naming conventions, algorithmic bias, and platform governance, they impose aesthetic norms while concealing their influence. To address these challenges, we advocate for transparency-driven interventions and a critical rethinking of algorithmic …

Not building offshore wind power in #NewJersey is so sad.
https://ww…

“[T]here can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully,” he said & that those who were violent were not armed with weapons or organized to overthrow the government.
✅ Q&A on Federalizing the #NationalGuard in #LosAngeles - FactCheck.org

Q&A on Federalizing the National Guard in Los Angeles - FactCheck.org
The disagreement between President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom over Trump deploying state National Guard troops to Los Angeles is now being debated in court. We’ll explain how the situation developed and answer some common questions.

Identifying Algorithmic and Domain-Specific Bias in Parliamentary Debate Summarisation
Eoghan Cunningham, James Cross, Derek Greene
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14221

Identifying Algorithmic and Domain-Specific Bias in Parliamentary Debate Summarisation
The automated summarisation of parliamentary debates using large language models (LLMs) offers a promising way to make complex legislative discourse more accessible to the public. However, such summaries must not only be accurate and concise but also equitably represent the views and contributions of all speakers. This paper explores the use of LLMs to summarise plenary debates from the European Parliament and investigates the algorithmic and representational biases that emerge in this context.…

I see @… has a similar reaction about a study that says something we want to hear.
Re that second remark, “The *point* of AI is to make cognitive abilities irrelevant,” well, that’s the thing that’s up for debate right now. Making cognitive abilities (and thus labor, and people) irrelevant is very much the marketing pitch of the hype bubble. That pitch is about cost cutting, and about fear and intimidation — an intoxicating, investor-frothing mixture of fantasy and terror.
It’s not the only vision of AI, however.
https://hachyderm.io/@datarama/114693869134389025

Paramount's streaming head Cindy Holland says streaming movies are "not a priority", as CEO David Ellison says debate on value of theatrical releases is "over" (Matt Donnelly/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/par

Streaming Movies ‘Not a Priority’ at Paramount-Skydance
The new leadership team at Skydance's Paramount clarified their position on streaming and theatrically released films.

The $10~\rm{kpc}$ collar of early-type galaxies -- probing evolution by focusing on the inner stellar density profile
Rongfu Liu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Alessandro Sonnenfeld (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Carlo Nipoti (Alma Mater Studiorum - Universit\`a di Bologna), Rui Li (Zhengzhou University)
https://arxiv.org/ab…

The $10~\rm{kpc}$ collar of early-type galaxies -- probing evolution by focusing on the inner stellar density profile
Context: The post-quenching evolution process of early-type galaxies (ETGs) is still not fully understood. The amount of growth in stellar mass and size incurred after quenching is still under debate. Aims: In this work we aim to investigate the late evolution of ETGs, both observationally and theoretically, by focusing on the stellar mass density profile inside a fixed aperture, within $10$~kpc from the galaxy center. Methods: We first studied the stellar mass and mass-weighted density slo…

You say you represent my rights in Parliament? Alright, I want my rights asserted right now. Not later, not after some debate, right now.
What’s that, you can’t? Fine, then I’m done with your system. If you won’t give me my rights, I’ll claim them myself. Anarchy it is.
#Anarchy #Anarchism

Top three Goldfrapp albums IMO:
1. Felt Mountain (not up for debate, sorry)
2. Silver Eye
3. Black Cherry
With this list as a preface, I pose to you, the reader, a daunting question:
Should I listen to Alison Goldfrapp’s new releases, or are they going to make me Upset somehow (not musically, just re: the post-Goldfrapp era in which we now find ourselves)

I know it is well-meaning, but extrapolating the total size of 2000 events from 320 reports is bogus unless one models the size distribution and how that influences whether an event has a report. I.e. big events get reported, smaller ones not so much.
Even with that, it would be very much open to debate.

I'm not an anti-intellectualist, but I do believe people can overcomplicate things. I had a debate once with someone who argued “well, aren't we all migrants? All of humanity emerged from the African continent, so...” and I mean, sure, that's true, but now you're just playing with definitions of words rather than accepting the agreed upon definition in order to engage with this debate.
While people like Jordan Peterson are prominent examples of pseudo-intellectuals, who…

K2-18b Does Not Meet The Standards of Evidence For Life
Kevin B. Stevenson, Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, E. M. May, Ravi K. Kopparapu, Thomas J. Fauchez, Jacob Haqq-Misra, Mary Anne Limbach, Edward W. Schwieterman, Kristin S. Sotzen, Shang-Min Tsai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05961

K2-18b Does Not Meet The Standards of Evidence For Life
K2-18b, a temperate sub-Neptune, has garnered significant attention due to claims of possible biosignatures in its atmosphere. Low-confidence detections of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) have sparked considerable debate, primarily around arguments that their absorption features are not uniquely identifiable. Here, we consider a different question from the astrobiology standards of evidence framework: Have we detected an authentic signal? To answer this, we analyzed prev…

I can’t help it, I somehow feel gaslighted by the whole #GenAI debate. People who are critical of GenAI are often told “but when done right, you’re just so much more productive, so obviously you just didn’t to it right.” So I’m trying. Not because I feel I need to, but because I just want to get a realistic impression of the capabilities, and be able to discuss these with my students.
Then fancy…

housing ownership law possibilities
Should we maybe have a law that says any one person or entity can only own a max of 2 houses? Or that you can only own 1 not being lived in by your immediate family?
I can see several reasonable use cases for having 1 extra house, including when an old person dies and the family takes a while to decide what's happening with their previous house. And we could debate those cases, and maybe even decide it's not worth arguing over 2 or 3 extra, because that isn't the biggest problem.
But I think we could possibly mostly agree that having one person or company own 5 or 10 or 50 or 500 houses just to extract profit from them is not good for overall wellbeing.
#housing #law #HouseOwnership #HousingMarket #renting #RentalMarket

Palestine Action / UK censorship
Good article from @….
"While the groups actions may constitute criminal damage, their actions do not represent an attempt to induce fear in the population by creating an imminent threat to life. ...
"Proscribing Palestine Action as terrorists is not about public safety – it is about suppressing protest that we may disagree or agree with, but that stands well short of being an attempt to strike fear into the British public through the use of indiscriminate violence against people. In equating support of damage to military property with support of terrorism, it endangers legitimate debate about the UK-Israel arms trade. ...
"As there is no public evidence of any link to terrorism or support of terrorist groups from Palestine Action, Open Rights Group supports their decision to appeal proscription. While we may have differing opinions on their tactics, we stand against this attack on their right to exist and speak out."
#PalestineAction #UK #censorship #UKPol