also I ended up looking at stuff about soviet agricultural experiments and apparently dogbane (Apocyonum cannabinum) was introduced to the USSR as a fiber crop plant? ???
found this ebook from 1902 which is the first time I’ve encountered the thing I was searching for so long- an EXHAUSTIVE list of Everything that can be used as a textile fiber.
Starting to get alarmed at how much information is trapped forever in obscure books from 1902 because the sources that came after failed to repeat it! what!
We were really into investigating the potential of plants to be useful before plastic happened, huh.
I don’t understand why dogbane hasn’t got any attention in the textiles world. it was used by basically every native american group in USA for, what, 12,000 years minimum? It gives crazy yields, the fibers are RIDICULOUSLY strong and sooo soft, and requires zero chemical processing or retting. You could mechanize the harvesting and processing easily. In terms of the quality and usefulness of fiber and the amount you get out of it relative to the amount of work it just blows everything else out of the water
but NOBODY’S USING IT
I found all this stuff because i was looking up sources on dogbane. Most sources that even MENTION dogbane in the past 30 years are literally just discussing how to kill it with chemicals
If you’d rather not use Google, the book by William I. Hannan on the textile fibers is available from the Internet Archive.
“I can now say with absolute confidence that many AI systems have been trained on TV and film writers’ work. Not just on The Godfather and Alf, but on more than 53,000 other movies and 85,000 other TV episodes: Dialogue from all of it is included in an AI-training data set that has been used by Apple, Anthropic, Meta, Nvidia, Salesforce, Bloomberg, and other companies. I recently downloaded this data set, which I saw referenced in papers about the development of various large language models (or LLMs). It includes writing from every film nominated for Best Picture from 1950 to 2016, at least 616 episodes of The Simpsons, 170 episodes of Seinfeld, 45 episodes of Twin Peaks, and every episode of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad.”
A reminder that antifacism is a thing you DO, not an organisation you JOIN.
Calling a hotel and telling them a KKK chapter rented their ballroom for a meeting is antifa action
Pulling down posters promoting hate groups is antifa action (and if you do, use your keys, not your hands. Some groups put razor blades behind their postings to hurt anyone who takes them down)
Addressing local tensions in your community by participating in food drives and supporting disempowered folks can be antifacist, as facist groups will use community fears to stir up hate and gain power.
Going to an event where a figure whom fascists tend to align with and peacefully protesting is antifa action, whether that speaker thinks they’re fascist or not.
It’s not a club, religion, or organization. You don’t pay dues. Being antifa means actively trying to prevent fascism from being built, usually in local ways that respond to immediate community needs. If you see ANYTHING that talks about officially joining a group or organization, it is SUSPECT.
I can’t understand it. I can’t understand why someone would see orthodox children walking to school and feel the need to throw glass at them. I don’t have anything to say anymore. I hate this world.
Next year will be Big Tech’s finale. Critique of Big Tech is now common sense, voiced by a motley spectrum that unites opposing political parties, mainstream pundits, and even tech titans such as the VC powerhouse Y Combinator, which is singing in harmony with giants like a16z in proclaiming fealty to “little tech” against the centralized power of incumbents.
Why the fall from grace? One reason is that the collateral consequences of the current Big Tech business model are too obvious to ignore. The list is old hat by now: centralization, surveillance, information control. It goes on, and it’s not hypothetical. Concentrating such vast power in a few hands does not lead to good things. No, it leads to things like the CrowdStrike outage of mid-2024, when corner-cutting by Microsoft led to critical infrastructure—from hospitals to banks to traffic systems—failing globally for an extended period.
Another reason Big Tech is set to falter in 2025 is that the frothy AI market, on which Big Tech bet big, is beginning to lose its fizz. Major money, like Goldman Sachs and Sequoia Capital, is worried. They went public recently with their concerns about the disconnect between the billions required to create and use large-scale AI, and the weak market fit and tepid returns where the rubber meets the AI business-model road.
It doesn’t help that the public and regulators are waking up to AI’s reliance on, and generation of, sensitive data at a time when the appetite for privacy has never been higher—as evidenced, for one, by Signal’s persistent user growth. AI, on the other hand, generally erodes privacy. We saw this in June when Microsoft announced Recall, a product that would, I kid you not, screenshot everything you do on your device so an AI system could give you “perfect memory” of what you were doing on your computer (Doomscrolling? Porn-watching?). The system required the capture of those sensitive images—which would not exist otherwise—in order to work.
Happily, these factors aren’t just liquefying the ground below Big Tech’s dominance. They’re also powering bold visions for alternatives that stop tinkering at the edges of the monopoly tech paradigm, and work to design and build actually democratic, independent, open, and transparent tech. Imagine!
For example, initiatives in Europe are exploring independent core tech infrastructure, with convenings of open source developers, scholars of governance, and experts on the political economy of the tech industry.
And just as the money people are joining in critique, they’re also exploring investments in new paradigms. A crop of tech investors are developing models of funding for mission alignment, focusing on tech that rejects surveillance, social control, and all the bullshit. One exciting model I’ve been discussing with some of these investors would combine traditional VC incentives (fund that one unicorn > scale > acquisition > get rich) with a commitment to resource tech’s open, nonprofit critical infrastructure with a percent of their fund. Not as investment, but as a contribution to maintaining the bedrock on which a healthy tech ecosystem can exist (and maybe get them and their limited partners a tax break).
Such support could—and I believe should—be supplemented by state capital. The amount of money needed is simply too vast if we’re going to do this properly. To give an example closer to home, developing and maintaining Signal costs around $50 million a year, which is very lean for tech. Projects such as the Sovereign Tech Fund in Germany point a path forward—they are a vehicle to distribute state funds to core open source infrastructures, but they are governed wholly independently, and create a buffer between the efforts they fund and the state.
Just as composting makes nutrients from necrosis, in 2025, Big Tech’s end will be the beginning of a new and vibrant ecosystem. The smart, actually cool, genuinely interested people will once again have their moment, getting the resources and clearance to design and (re)build a tech ecosystem that is actually innovative and built for benefit, not just profit and control. MAY IT BE EVER THUS!
An absolutely necessary aspect of sovereign tech funds or communal open source investment MUST be the open-sourcing and archiving of abandonware.
This should be true of ANY software, ideally, but at a bare minimum, the source code for medical equipment must remain accessible even after the distributing company goes bankrupt or discontinues the product.
I’ve talked before on the “fandomization” of the I/P conflict, specifically how the hardcore “antizionists” have essentially invented Level 4 Palestine Headcanons
And the latest such “headcanon” to really take center stage has been the “12,500” to “1,000,000” years of “history” for Palestine.
Combined with a few other comments on the whole thing, it has led me to a realization about these people and their claims to be “standing up for minorities”.
Said realization is simple, based on what their claims say about them:
If the people they’re advocating for haven’t been pure and innocent and “unproblematic” for the literal entire duration of recorded human history, if that ethnic group has any skeletons in the closet at all…
Then they’re not worth advocating for in the slightest.
And that’s what we’re seeing here, with this propagandized version of Palestinian history–since Palestinians aren’t anywhere near perfect, a made up version of their history needs to be created in order to “justify” advocating for them.
It’s sad, really.
Something I was talking about was the Team Edward/Team Jacob-isation of it all. Pro-Palestine has evolved into this… weird politicised fandom aesthetic. It’s not about Palestinians really. It’s about the tropes, the simplified story of an imagined oppressed group rising up against the imagined oppressive white-coded fascists. It’s a blatant denial of Palestinian agency and involvement in their own oppression and a denial of the oppression of Jewish people - as well as a gross misunderstanding of Palestinian oppression by Western influences and Hamas and Israeli military dominance. It’s a very very black and white, Westernised marketing tactic being applied to a very convoluted and complex situation that has been going on for a couple thousand years stemming from a hatred older than most forms of racism people are familiar with today.
I beg my kidnappers for a phone, swearing not to make any calls or texts, and they stare over my shoulder, holding a gun to my head as I use my newly-freed hand to post, “So do like, dudes just buy ropes and baklavas from the same store or what lmfao like a specialty Crime Store”
One of the kidnappers says “balaclavas” but it’s muffled under the fabric. I ask them to repeat and they do, their voice raspy from disuse. “You wrote baklava, that’s a pastry.” The other kidnapper goes “stfu” and then after a pause goes “Why would you buy from a crime store”
Humans: *encounters Earth’s Largest Carnivore, who would could swallow them whole, probably*
Human: … Spin?
Earth’s largest carnivore, with a brain that weighs almost as much as this naked beach ape*: SPIN!
WHAT DO YOU MEAN SPERM WHALES ARE CARNIVORES
I THOUGHT THEY ATE KRILL AND STUFF LIKE OTHER WHALES
Nope! Sperm whales eat extremely large deep-sea squids, like the Giant and Colossal Squids. They have also been known to opportunistically eat dead whales, sharks, and seals, but not actively hunt them. They got real big teeth for it too:
However, they only have teeth on thier bottom jaw! they have corresponding holes in their top jaw for the teeth to lock into, which makes hanging onto a slippery, boneless squid:
It should be noted that the human here isn’t in particular danger of being eaten on purpose, but an accidental swing of it’s multi-ton head, a clip from the teeth, or being directly in the line of it’s sonar could seriously injure or kill them- Divers that have been in the direct line of echolocation for a sperm whale calf have described being hit with the soundwave like “being kicked by a horse” and some have suffered internal organ damage. Sperm whales, like other large whales, aren’t particularly aggressive towards humans, but they are still very large wild animals who behave in unpredictable ways.
I know that in US waters, it’s illegal to intentionally come within 300 yards of any whale or dolphin, and if one appears closer you should turn off your engine or stop paddling to avoid accidental injury to you or it. This human is doing something dangerous and ill-advised, but it’s still hopeful that we can love something like a 130,000 lb deep-diving, squid-eating Oceanic former ungulate.
Im.sorry I’ve lived my entire life not realizing that echolocation could possibly be felt and I have to come to terms with the fact that whales have sonic attacks
Small tangent but just to be clear: blue whales are also carnivores/predators. All whales are. (“Whales” in general are likely what they were referring to as “world’s largest carnivore”).
At the California Institute of the Arts, it all started with a videoconference between the registrar’s office and a nonprofit.
One of the nonprofit’s representatives had enabled an AI note-taking tool from Read AI. At the end of the meeting, it emailed a summary to all attendees, said Allan Chen, the institute’s chief technology officer. They could have a copy of the notes, if they wanted — they just needed to create their own account.
Next thing Chen knew, Read AI’s bot had popped up inabout a dozen of his meetings over a one-week span. It was in one-on-one check-ins. Project meetings. “Everything.”
The spread “was very aggressive,” recalled Chen, who also serves as vice president for institute technology. And it “took us by surprise.”
The scenariounderscores a growing challenge for colleges: Tech adoption and experimentation among students, faculty, and staff — especially as it pertains to AI — are outpacing institutions’ governance of these technologies and may even violate their data-privacy and security policies.
That has been the case with note-taking tools from companies including Read AI, Otter.ai, and Fireflies.ai.They can integrate with platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teamsto provide live transcriptions, meeting summaries, audio and video recordings, and other services.
Higher-ed interest in these products isn’t surprising.For those bogged down with virtual rendezvouses, a tool that can ingest long, winding conversations and spit outkey takeaways and action items is alluring. These services can also aid people with disabilities, including those who are deaf.
But the tools can quickly propagate unchecked across a university. They can auto-join any virtual meetings on a user’s calendar — even if that person is not in attendance. And that’s a concern, administrators say, if it means third-party productsthat an institution hasn’t reviewedmay be capturing and analyzing personal information, proprietary material, or confidential communications.
“What keeps me up at night is the ability for individual users to do things that are very powerful, but they don’t realize what they’re doing,” Chen said. “You may not realize you’re opening a can of worms.“
The Chronicle documented both individual and universitywide instances of this trend. At Tidewater Community College, in Virginia, Heather Brown, an instructional designer, unwittingly gave Otter.ai’s tool access to her calendar, and it joined a Faculty Senate meeting she didn’t end up attending. “One of our [associate vice presidents] reached out to inform me,” she wrote in a message. “I was mortified!”
THIS HAPPENED AT WORK!!!
One of the parties in a grievance mediation had Otter.ai installed on his computer for a previous meeting. He thought (and, honestly, had been led to believe by the company) that he was the one triggering when it was used, and had wanted it to provide captions and a transcription for another meeting. He intended to use it once. Unbeknownst to him, it activated on EVERY MEETING. The worst part is no one noticed, so it is actually unclear how many meetings he’d been in that the AI had been activated on, but for this particular meeting, it sent the meeting host (my colleague) an email saying that it was RECORDING (which is illegal in this line of work, highly illegal, there’s hearings in Congress right now on someone recording a negotiations meeting) the proceedings.
The goal of the email was for her to see how “helpful” of a tool that it was so that she could download it as well and enable it in her meetings. It sent her 1) an attendance summary (private); 2) a transcript of the meeting so far (illegal) and 3) a snippet of audio from the meeting (highly illegal). They had to stop the mediation entirely, switch to old school phones to see where the issue was and who had this enabled on their computer. The man was horribly embarrassed, and had to get help from his IT department to get the program uninstalled from his computer.
Genuinely, these AI tools are viruses. Because of this, we’ve been asking external people at the start of meetings if anyone else is present off-screen (a different story) or if anyone has AI programs installed on their computer. But most people don’t KNOW because Copilot is now installed behind their backs, and it’s being sneakier than other programs (like Microsoft isn’t going to email someone and say “Hey, by the way, we’ve been listening into your meetings”), but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing the same things.
If you are downloading and using these programs, please be aware of this and please fucking uninstall them.
“average zaunite commits 2 war crimes per year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average zaunite commits 0.0004 war crimes per year. Warcrimes Singed, who lives in cave & commits over 2000 war crimes each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
