Nice to know there might still be hope for me yet!

For me currently, it’s Ursula K LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I’m a little over halfway through, but for whatever reason I can’t seem to read more than a few pages before I have to take a break, making progress really slow. I also struggled to get through A Wizard of Earthsea, even though I enjoyed the setting, plot, and characters, so I think the problem is simply a matter of not jiving with her writing style.

Fortunately the book isn’t in high demand at my library so renewing it hasn’t been an issue, but I just picked up three other books (holds that finally came in) and I’ve been struggling to justify starting them until I can get LHoD finished first. Ironically one of the new books is a long-time stuck book for me: as a teenager I dropped Xenocide midway through (IIRC it wasn’t as fast-paced as the first two Ender books so I got bored) and now years later I’ve challenged myself with finally finishing it.

Article buries the lede:

Even worse, xAI has demanded employees’ intimate data to train avatars including Ani. In recording of a meeting obtained by the WSJ, xAI legal counsel Lily Lim informed a group of employees that the startup was developing avatars for users to engage with and told them they were required to provide biometric data. Before the meeting, employees were provided a form to sign granting xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” for the use, reproduction and distribution of their faces and voices.

Not sure I have a problem with anyone working to build AI having to put their biometric data where their mouth is.

In this thread: a lot of chocking

HealthyCanning is an excellent resource for safe canning recipes. They have several green tomato recipes here: https://www.healthycanning.com/tag/green-tomatoes

Given these are cherry tomatoes, I’d especially recommend this recipe: https://www.healthycanning.com/pickled-green-tomatoes

I’ve also found that salsa freezes surprisingly well in wide mouth mason jars.

Finally, if you let them sit out, many (most? all?) of your green tomatoes will eventually turn red.

Considering their past behavior, if the Portland Police Bureau says you’ve gone too far, you’re basically Satan himself.

Enterprise? No, no, no … DS9.

“xAI’s Grok was created based on a philosophy of sort of absolute, radical openness, and it will talk about anything with anyone,” said Mark Daley, chief AI officer at Western University in London, Ont. U of W’s Chief AI Officer Mark Daley poses for a photo Mark Daley, chief AI officer at Western University, says Grok should post warnings to alert people of explicit content. (Hugo Levesque/CBC)

“[Musk is] a free speech extremist. He wants Grok to be completely open, to have any conversation with anyone. And that’s a principled stance that he’s taken, but it may not be what every consumer is looking for.”

Musk is only a self-declared free speech extremist, as anyone who knows anything about how he’s handled Xitter and Grok would be quick to point out. Not sure this was a great choice of subject matter expert to interview for this article.

Are you still teaching English or did you manage to get out and do something else? My understanding of English teaching in Asia is that it’s a bit of a career trap.

You only need to plant sorrel in your garden once. It’s the ultimate volunteer crop. Quite winter-hardy too, and perennial, plus it tastes like lemon. Halfway between an herb and a green.

First glance def had me thinking this was gonna be tampon related

elsewhere protesters have used the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta

That would be the millennials

These places exist, but they are expensive as fuuuuuuuuck

Yeah but this is Daily Beast; calling out the DT administration (albeit in click-bait ways) is their shtick.

I know about razor bumps and I don’t mean to make it out to be a total non-issue; my problem is with the headline and byline, which seem to make light of what was actually a deeply disturbing speech. “Look at this idiot, ranting about beards, much ado about nothing, don’t even bother reading about what he said, it was just stupid fluff, shoulda been an email lol!” is not the message that the media needs to tell the public when both Hegseth and Trump made several horrifying, fascism-escalating statements today. (And let’s be real, most people don’t actually read the articles, so burying the lede like this is functionally similar to not reporting on it at all.)

His comment about beards is iterally the least problematic/newsworthy part of his speech. Why the fuck would you focus on this and not, I don’t know, his straight outta 1984 “war is peace” statement? Extreme journalistic malpractice.

Get Netflix to sponsor the protest by selling it as a live action remake of Kill la Kill?

Darwin was also born into wealth and could spend his life studying whatever piqued his interest. Do you have the funds to spend five years circumnavigating the globe studying cool wildlife? Because I sure as fuck don’t.

DS-9 is even worse about this. Entire senior staff and Captain on secret mission on the Defiant into a war zone, practically every other episode of seasons 5 and 6. Still somehow better track record of returning home without ado than Bashir’s attempting to attend a medical conference.

Fascinating article, definitely worth the read. OP you should include it in the main post!