be kind or die by my sword

she/her. artist. Currently ruminating on White Collar and Leverage mostly.

[sztupy]

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for the content of its AI search overviews. According to the court, previou

[ayeforscotland]

Let’s fucking go

[made-in-manetheren]

This is HUGE.

1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.

2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.

3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."

4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.

TL;DR Google reeeeeally stepped in it this time.

[fandomsandfeminism]

This may be the best Pride merch I've seen from a major corporation.

Levi's said yes, actually. Assless chaps and a biker vest. Happy Pride.

And the assless chaps sold out on June 1.

[aetherograph]

They also specifically contacted members of the leather community, used them as models iirc, and donated $100k to Outright International. They talked the talk and walked the walk and put their money on it too. I don't really care that I can't afford and don't want this merch, I love to see my community getting the respect it deserves. Levi's said, "We make jeans which gays wear lots of jeans? Oh leather daddies? Let's call them."

[fandomsandfeminism]

I think Levi's donates to Outreach International every year too, as well as sponsoring pride events and other community support. They were offering Same Sex domestic partner benefits to employees in the 90s, and have been very public about their support for pro-lgbt legislation all through the 2000s.

So, you know, a giant corporation that walks the walk pretty consistently.

[morningsaidthemoon]

commissioned by @gettownsburnmoney, based on this post !!!

[hell-on-sticks]

Today in australia they started senate hearings on the bill the government hopes will make enough disabled people die or disappear to make us all less irritatingly expensive for them. We had two weeks to submit feedback on over 400 pages of complicated legal terms. They don't care what we have to say and they don’t care that this will kill people and disenfranchise disabled people across the country.

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare.

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

Sorry we're too expensive to have rights, I guess.

[rederiswrites]

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

[katsdom]

The above is doubly true if the content of the email is something that will be important to the person receiving - especially something that affects them negatively. They see that this thing that affected them so much didn't matter enough to you to write it yourself. I was a bystander to such a thing not long ago and it was just awful.

[timemachineyeah]

Imagine if we took the cop budget and turned it into a free ride service budget

[timemachineyeah]

Bringing this post back because I wanna talk about it more.

Read an article in the local paper submitted anonymously by a woman who got a DUI two years ago.

My first instinct was to hate her. Because I hate drinking and driving. Viscerally. Anyone who knows me knows how intense I can be about impaired driving of all kinds (drunk, high, tired). It’s not worth it. It gets people killed. I lost a good friend to a drunk driver. Don’t ever. I’ve gotten in fights with people! I have stolen keys!

“Don’t ever” was, in fact, the point of her writing it. But not because of the danger posed to others. Because of how much a single DUI had ruined her life for two straight years. This also didn’t garner much sympathy from me, because obviously the REAL reason not to drink and drive is because you could kill someone. What do I care if someone irresponsible is inconvenienced?

Anyway, this woman was pulled over after leaving a bar where she had two beers to drive a few blocks to her friend’s place. This didn’t really make me more sympathetic because I’m a hardass when it comes to drinking and driving, but she wasn’t pulled over for any kind of impaired driving. She was driving perfectly. It was clearly the kind of stop that happens late at night when the cops are just fishing. The cop made up something about her stickers being placed wrong or a faulty light, before making her take the normal physical impairment tests (as someone with dyspraxia these scare the shit out of me, but that’s neither here nor there) which she passed just fine. In fact, her driving was perfect, her reactions were perfect. But then came the breathalyzer. And her blood alcohol was just too high.

She got arrested.

And the rest of article was her detailing her attempts since to try to get her license back.

The for profit companies she had to take classes from, the for profit companies who make you pay to install the breathalyzer in your car, how if you are able to plead poverty to get aid for that installation you also have to commit to going once a month to a for profit company that will calibrate your discounted breathalyzer and how if you don’t go your car will get remotely bricked and how the pandemic interrupted the hours of these places without notice meaning her car needed to be towed when she missed an appointment after the place was closed when she expected it to be open, how this added to her sentence, how she lost her insurance.

As I read this, I thought, sure, about how much I hate drunk driving. About my knee-jerk, visceral lack of sympathy. And I asked myself:

Does any of this actually make me feel safer?

And it doesn’t. It doesn’t make me feel any safer at all. This woman was writing this article to say “Don’t drink and drive. Not even once. It’s not worth it.” But what I got from it was, these punitive measures aren’t preventing people from drinking and driving. They’re just… giving cops and for-profits fun new ways to mistreat and exploit normal people. People we, people I personally, can feel disinclined to protect because of judgments we have about them.

Meanwhile, people are still going to drink and drive.

And I thought about what would work. What would make me feel safer. And you know what would make me feel safer? If people who hadn’t planned ahead could still get a ride home. I’d much rather someone call the police (or a service that’s one of the many we institute to replace them) and go “I drove here but I don’t think I’m safe to drive home” and have the reply be “someone will be right there”. Then a pair of public servants show up, one to drive you home and one to drive your car home, and you get home safe.

I would love for traffic safety to be, like, the actual goal of how we manage traffic laws.

But more than that, punitive attempts to control people, blatant disproven behaviorism, doesn’t work. If your political philosophy is about finding the “bad” or “undeserving” and ensuring they struggle, I can’t identify with it. It’s hard to come up with a type of “common crime” that I have more disdain for than drinking and driving, but disapproving of the way this woman has been treated is not the same as justifying her actions. I don’t care! I don’t care if she learns her lesson! I don’t care if I like her! Everything you’re doing to her for a single breathalyzer failure is not keeping the roads safer!

The moment she failed the breathalyzer, you should’ve just given her a ride. That’s all I need.

[bearlyfunctioning]

Comic #355 : Chronic pain is isolating - Website links here ~ Here's a comic for the spoonies, the suffering and the lonesome. Let's take ibuprofen together 🐻💊 That's right it's a double length comic! I had a lot to say that wouldn't fit in 4 panels 🥲

[odinsblog]

“Encouragement and attention are like sunshine and water to a plant for a child's growth and self esteem.”

[tar0]

(Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergere (Getty Center Exhibitions)から)

[nyantara]

[…] the conversation that many have assumed was transpiring between the barmaid and gentleman is revealed to be an optical trick—the man stands outside the painter’s field of vision, to the left, and looks away from the barmaid, rather than standing right in front of her. The barmaid’s frontality is also deceptive. Rather than standing parallel to the bar and looking straight ahead, she stands slightly askance, facing the offset viewpoint.

Most ironically, the reflected edge of the bar, which in an offset view would tilt more acutely to the right, is revealed to be a visual decoy, leading us to believe that the vanishing point lies directly behind the barmaid. Thus, the paintings most obvious perspectival clue turns out to be its most subversive perspectival violation.

From Getty Center article

[goldcrescent]

I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while they’re growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think they’ll get bulky as though bulking isn’t a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density 🥀

[goldcrescent]

if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like you’re insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like “girls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]” nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old

[no-wifi-in-the-void]

doing my bi-monthly leverage rewatch and i am once again reminded that the only time the crew saw nate grow old was through that portrait hardison painted.

[beautifulscreaminglady]

#do you ever think sophie looks at it (esp pre-redemption) and thinks about what could have been?#while also knowing it’s not really nate it’s a version of nate that doesn’t exist?#but also understanding it’s the closest she’ll get to growing old with him???

why would say something so hurtful

[isabelladevereaux]

parker is the one instantly interested in nate's ability to see the big picture. in the first ten minutes of the Nigerian job nate tells her how he knows the guards aren't at their station and she goes "I would've missed that." then at the end of the episode, she's the one that she's good at one thing, but he knows other things. she's always learning things from the others in a way no one else is. sometimes crime things, sometimes real life/social things, sometimes both. eliot teaches her to fight, sophie teaches her to grift, she doesn't hack, but she handles tech better than anyone but hardison. (eliot teaches her to like things, sophie teaches her how to have/be a friend, hardison teaches her to trust) she runs her own jobs, on her own, where the rest of the team never does. at first it doesn't work (the inside job) but then it does ( the broken wing job). obviously we see nate actually pull her into the planning in the long goodbye job in preparation for the ending, but she's been interested in learning from him, learning how to do what he does, since the very start. at first I think it was out of her self-preservation mindset, she didn't expect to have people to back her up, maybe ever. but even after she figures out they're sticking around, she won't have to run jobs alone, she keeps learning. from nate, from sophie, from eliot, from hardison, even tara. eventually, from harry. because of harry, from breanna. she accepts their input in a way nate never did, in a way nate never could. his "sicko love of control" wouldn't let him. but from the start, parker lets them teach her. and that carries over in the way she leads. she controls herself, never them. she makes the final call, but she wants input first. not because she can't make the decision herself, but because she sees the big picture in a different way than nate. she's watched the team save each other's skin over and over because one person noticed or knew something no one else did, and she knows she isn't always that person. they all grow so much in those first five years, and I don't know if I even think parker grew the most. but I do think she grew the most intentionally. she looked at all the others, saw what skills they had that she didn't, and decided she would learn.

[zoesupreme]

[brainscrems]

Valuable tags from @doberbutts

[depsidase]

[rhinestoneintherough]

 Opened the parade with Dykes on Bikes, riding through thousands of people flying our own  little fuck you to  the military recruiters at SF pride this year. 

[90s-kid-sad-adult]

lie to me

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]