Post type: Link

The singularity is the victim of bad press. Instead of an omniscient superintelligence, it’s more of a “human centipede” of AI-generated content.

I remain not completely anti-AI, just against its predominant usage of "producing content that otherwise no one would bother to pay for or take the time to create on their own."

A Penn State Health medical facility denied a patient a gender-affirming surgery (it had already scheduled!) because the patient is nonbinary. The stated reason is because the facility (St. Joseph) has a "Catholic healing mission that guides [it]."

Penn State Health is a nonprofit spinoff created by Penn State University (and partially owned by Highmark). Though I did not work directly for PSH, my direct manager did (the lines between Penn State College of Medicine and PSH are weird). When they were first looking to acquire St. Joe's, a number of us (queer folk, women) who shared the demographics of those who might be impacted were worried about exactly this sort of thing.

PSH claims they "are committed to providing services that lead to healthier outcomes for our patients and a more respectful, supportive, inclusive and productive work environment for our employees." Unless you're trans in Berks County, apparently!

But the real answer as to why they did it is they wanted to be in the market, and buying St Joe's was the fastest/cheapest way to accomplish that. St. Joe's refused to be acquired unless they were allowed keep their "Catholic tradition" as the guiding force behind their actions.

PSH should have said no. If St. Joe's still balked and closed as a result, PSH could have bought the building and hired staffers who wanted to serve the entire region's population, not just those who agree with the religious tenets the former institution believed in.

Instead, PSH chased the money. Though I value my former coworkers (and believe most, if not all, of the ones I directly worked with would rather provide care to everyone at all facilities), I'm ashamed to have been associated, even tangentially, with such an organization.

Peloton will start charging people a one-time $95 "used equipment activation fee" for used bikes purchased from outside of Peloton and its official distribution partners.

...

During the call, Peloton's interim CEO, Christopher Bruzzo, said that the activation fee "will be a source of incremental revenue and gross profit" and support Peloton's "investments in improving the fitness experience for our members." Peloton also claimed in a letter to shareholders that the fee is related to ensuring that the subscription customers that Peloton gains through used bike sales "receive the same high-quality onboarding experience."

Without any central leader or governing body, every decision is being made with only short-term gains in mind.

The big problem there is that no one cares about minor-league anything. The people who now run this sport are gutting everything that makes it special: history, tradition, underdogs, parity, surprises, personalities, regional flavor, and vigor. They’re replacing all that with matchups of big-name brands in an effort to appeal to the sort of casual fan who doesn’t really care about college football anyway. College football is well on its way to eating itself alive

I can't explain how this feels.

Athletics bans don't affect me, personally, in terms of preventing me from playing sports - I'm well beyond the age or ability for it to matter.

But that fact doesn't make it feel any less like another punch to the head, another hit to the gut, another in a long line of kicks when I already feel so beaten down.

I can't explain this feeling.

It's yet another way of being told that we're different, separate from, less than. Trans women are women except. Trans men are men but.

It's especially disheartening when so many struggle to have even the basic aspects of their dignity respected (names, pronouns, getting an education, not getting fired for existing while trans). Time and again, the only concrete actions taken are to strip more from us.

I can't feel.

It's a systematic desecration of our humanity, a systemic approach to telling us not only do we not belong, but that we shouldn't exist.

A cistem built on our destruction.

I can't.

Gird your curds! Say a prayer for Camembert! A collapse in microbe diversity puts these French cheeses at risk.

Found out today Pogo sucks as a human.

I hate when I found out art I enjoy was created by assholes. But I have little problem dropping it from my life - there's way too much art out there made by people who aren't awful.

It is incredible that all of this works with just a single button click, but all that scaling complication also explains the bad news: you can only have a single Mac display in visionOS. You can’t have multiple Mac monitors floating in space. Maybe next time.

management's quest to see how much more cheaply an increasingly poor product can be sold at the same price and under the same name as what came before is, at bottom, the story of basically every industry or institution currently in decline or collapse.

The race to the bottom is a problem because nobody knows where to go once you've won

The details of a Russian expansion card from the 90s that allowed you to use a VHS tape as a storage medium.

“The big curiosity is what medium a Furby uses to record audio,” one employee wrote. “I would assume that since it can ‘respond’ to certain audio cues that it would use storage similar to a digital answering machine or straight computer memory chips. Anybody know?”

Others said “Furby is only a $35 toy and is not that sophisticated. As a previous [listserv] posting pointed out, the ‘learning’ the doll does is programmed into it so that the longer you use it the more it ‘knows.’”

A great reading of newly FOIA'd documents from the folks at 404 Media. I definitely understand the impetus to understate existing rules about banning personal electronics from NSA spaces, but doesn't it also smack somewhat of security by obscurity?

Apple keeps emphasizing that the Vision Pro isn’t meant to isolate you from the rest of the world, and the display on the front of the headset is designed to keep you connected to others.

I don't care if it isolates me? I don't want to be wearing it constantly, anyway.

If I'm perfectly honest, the killer VR app for me is working. If I can use a head-mounted display for a large screen for an existing computer (and get rid of the gigantic monitors of my workstation / use them when working away from home), I'm in.

Just ... not for $3.5K.