War News...

• Norwegian police still searching for suspect in bomb detonation at US embassy in Oslo.


• Synagogue in Belgium bombed, and three in Toronto shot up.


• Iranian missiles attacking Israel increasingly using cluster munitions.

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Memes for Monday!

Top. Men.

Info is coming out around the lawsuit regarding the DOGE cuts to National Endowment for the Humanities grants and... wow. 

Federal grants that had been approved after a full application and review process were terminated by some random inexperienced DOGE bros based on whether ChatGPT could explain—in under 120 characters—that they were “related to DEI.”

That’s what the newly released proposed amended complaint from the Authors Guild against the US government reveals about how DOGE actually decided which National Endowment for the Humanities grants to kill.

Apparently this posse of barely post-pubertal broccoli-haired incels were just feeding grant text into an LLM and asking "Chat, is this DEI?" 

Which, I guess, made sense since this merry band of Einsteins seems unclear on what "DEI" even is. I could only take a minute or two of this guy talking in circles in his deposition video trying to avoid admitting he has no idea what he's talking about.

This is how Indianapolis lost a federal grant to restore urban trees. See, if the trees in your city are, like, mostly elms or ash and Dutch elm disease or ash borers come through, that would be bad. So biodiversity in your city's trees is good... but whoops! The word "biodiversity" contains the word "diversity", and Chat-GPT says that's a no-no.

Or say you're at Duke University and you have a federal grant to study, oh, something involving disease transmission or transgenic genetic material... well, all the LLM sees is "trans" and bye bye disease research! 

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Memelight Savings Time!

Meme Dump!

Friday Memes!

Piercing the Veil

Way back in the mists of time, in the autumn of 2005 when this blog was still in diapers, there was a minor kerfuffle about the virtues and vices of blogging anonymously.

Since the sort of people who start blogs do so because they tend to have opinions on frickin' everything, it was no surprise that lots of people had opinions on the topic.

It's popped up here and there since then in various online spaces where I participate, like forums and certain corners of social media.

I'm pretty ambivalent on the topic. I don't blog anonymously because for me there's hardly any point in it. I've gone by my government name all over the web since the days of dialup but I respect that other people may not want to and, to rifle through Thomas Jefferson's desk drawers for an appropriate aphorism, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. You want to blog anonymously, knock yourself out.

But I do think it's chilling that one thing LLMs seem to be good at is sussing out anonymous posters and tying them to their wallet name via language use analysis.

Anonymity ain't what it used to be.

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Meme Dump!

War News...

• IRIS Dena, an Iranian frigate, has been torpedoed and sunk by US submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka.


• White House arranges evacuation of some social media influencers from Qatar.


• The Royal Navy is dispatching the HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, to assist in the defense of Cyprus from drone and missile attack.

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Hump Day Memes!

History Repeats Itself

During World War Two, the Hawker Typhoon and its successor, the Tempest, were vital to the interception of German V-1 "Buzz Bombs" due to their high speed capabilities at low altitudes.

On Sunday, a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon operating as part of the joint UK-Qatari Typhoon Squadron shot down an Iranian drone, probably a Shahed, headed for Qatar.

Qatar operates two squadrons of the jets themselves, and Qatari Air Force Typhoons claimed two Iranian Su-24 Fencer "Aardvarkski" fighter bombers, which would be the first claimed air-to-air kills of the current dust-up.

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Sauve Qui Peut

The UK has approximately twenty-thousand citizens... expats, tax refugees, tourists, and civilian workers ...in the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar is trying to scheme up a way to evacuate that many people.

The US State Department has issued a travel warning to US citizens for numerous nations in the region.

We've shut down consular services at the embassy in Doha and evacuated government employees and dependents. Like the UK, we also have about 10,000 American citizens in Qatar, but with commercial airline service disrupted, they're kinda on their own, per this professor at Georgetown University's campus in Qatar.

Meme Dump!