Tootfinder

The Johnson Amendment is not exactly a difficult law to parse.
To keep their sweet tax-exempt status, religious groups can’t endorse political candidates.
But evangelicals want to have their cake and eat it too. -- They don’t want to pay taxes, but they do want ministers to be able to climb into the pulpit and tell their flock who to vote for.
The "Alliance Defending Freedom", the hard-right law firm with a truly staggering track record of getting the United St…

Goodbye, separation of church and state
Churches now have extra special speech rights, thanks to Trump.

Unifying Streaming and Non-streaming Zipformer-based ASR
Bidisha Sharma, Karthik Pandia Durai, Shankar Venkatesan, Jeena J Prakash, Shashi Kumar, Malolan Chetlur, Andreas Stolcke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14434

Unifying Streaming and Non-streaming Zipformer-based ASR
There has been increasing interest in unifying streaming and non-streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to reduce development, training, and deployment costs. We present a unified framework that trains a single end-to-end ASR model for both streaming and non-streaming applications, leveraging future context information. We propose to use dynamic right-context through the chunked attention masking in the training of zipformer-based ASR models. We demonstrate that using right-context…

Your left and right brain hear language differently − a neuroscientist explains how https://theconversation.com/your-left-and-right-brain-hear-language-differently-a-neuroscientist-explains-how-257436

Your left and right brain hear language differently − a neuroscientist explains how
Left and right brains hear speech differently, yet how this divide forms was unclear − until mouse studies showed each hemisphere runs on its own developmental clock.

I have my share of issues with Parkrose Permaculture, but she has a lot of things I do strongly agree with. I can't stress enough that you never dehumanize your enemies. You can respond appropriately to violence. You can defend yourself from them by any means necessary. But you do not dehumanize them. You always limit your response to the minimum necessary to defend yourself.
There are a number of former Nazi skins who became antifascists after realizing they were wrong. Those folks tend to be some of the most dedicated because they feel a debt, and some of the most knowledgeable because they were there. Coming out of these types of cults, police included, is hard and takes time. A lot of us don't have the ability to work with them. But some do.
By repeatedly humanizing your opponent, you can break some of them. The #Seattle Police Department was not defunded but saw a massive reduction in numbers because their morale was destroyed. Some people will never change. Some people are broken and feel like they need the power. But if you change one person's mind, even give them something to think about, it's a crack. If even one cop quits, that's one less trained gun pointed at you in the future.
The 18 year old marines and federalized national guard troops out there are literally kids. A lot of them came from poor communities. They are being used in a way they haven't been trained to do, doing things they (should) have been told are not legal. They joined to get out of poverty, to go to college, or to "defend the American people" (regardless of how misguided that is). Few, if any, of them joined to abuse people. They will be especially open to persuasion.
Remind those troops that they are carrying out illegal orders, that they are being called on to violate their oath to protect the constitution, that they are suppressing the free speech of the fellow Americans they swore to defend. Remind them that the people they could be illegally arresting now are just like their parents, their neighbors, their families, the friends who didn't join. Remind them that this is the first step. They will be called on to kill Americans if they let this keep going.
Remind them ICE sleeps in hotels while they sleep on the ground. Remind them that their drunk and incompetent leadership thinks of them as disposable tools. Remind them that some of these people are out protesting *for them* against cuts to the VA and other services. Remind them that the people they're defending refuse to make college free so they can recruit from poor schools. Remind them that they will always be welcome when they're ready to join the side of freedom and justice.
When you dehumanize your enemies, you unify them. When you humanize your enemies, you can divide them. There is no weapon available to us right now so powerful as compassion.
https://youtu.be/YtWOYUDMsBw

Apparently DHH announced he’s moving to Linux; no big surprise there as there’s a sizable fraction of right-wing users of it (somewhere in the “rational-thinking, free speech, meritocracy & libertarian with a sprinkle of pseudoscience” oeuvre).
Something the Linux community has never managed to effectively deal with.

Please join me for today’s (July 7) free #MediaEdLab webinar, “Privacy, Power, and Platforms”
https://mediaeducationlab.com/events/privacy-power-and-platforms
We w…

Doublespeak, hypocrisy, and shameless lying are requirements to be a Republican these days.
#uspol #GOP #TrumpFascist

Intentionally Unintentional: GenAI Exceptionalism and the First Amendment
David Atkinson, Jena D. Hwang, Jacob Morrison
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05211 ht…

Intentionally Unintentional: GenAI Exceptionalism and the First Amendment
This paper challenges the assumption that courts should grant First Amendment protections to outputs from large generative AI models, such as GPT-4 and Gemini. We argue that because these models lack intentionality, their outputs do not constitute speech as understood in the context of established legal precedent, so there can be no speech to protect. Furthermore, if the model outputs are not speech, users cannot claim a First Amendment speech right to receive the outputs. We also argue that ex…

#USA: Even offensive speech must be protected under the first amendment!
#Europe: …says the guys who have never had their whole continent occupied by the #Nazis…

After hanging around in Dutch parliament for 35 years (8 years as assistant and speech writer for VVD, 27 years as MP), far-right Wilders just blew up his first own coalition, because the other parties didn't sign up for his new list of anti-refugee/asylumseeker ideas.

@… Yawn, I'm going to go ahead and use the block button now.
I suppose that stifles your speech on MY server too right?

«I think it says that we are in a scary world where it is hard to tell if this is true or not. Like 10 years ago this wouldn’t even be a possibility but now it is very plausible. I think it shows a growing crack down on free speech and our rights. Bigger picture to me is that we are going to be unjustly held accountable for things that are much within our right to do/possess.»
'My Bad:' Babyface Vance Meme Creator On Norwegian Tourist's Detainment
https://www.404media.co/vance-babyface-meme-mads-mikkelsen-norway-tourist/

#USA: Even offensive speech must be protected under the first amendment!
#Europe: …says the guys who have never had their whole continent occupied by the #Nazis…

How ironic - the the maga-regime now is trying to block visas to visit the US on the grounds that the applicant believes in (and perhaps practices) our First Amendment right of free speech...
"New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles"
https://www.

"James Cleverly takes on Kemi Badenoch over decision to ditch net zero targets"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #NetZero #Climate