#Meta data example

[enrcloud]

Understanding Meta Data: Definition and Real-World Examples

In the digital world, Meta Data plays a crucial role in organizing, categorizing, and improving information accessibility. Simply put, Meta Data is "data about data" that provides essential details about a file, document, webpage, or media. It helps search engines understand content better and improves user navigation.

A common Meta Data example includes webpage meta tags, which contain a title, description, and keywords to help search engines rank content effectively. Similarly, in images, Meta Data includes details like resolution, author, and creation date. In emails, it consists of sender information, subject lines, and timestamps.

[hkthatgffan]

The image used in the background of the Gravity Falls logo HAS BEEN FOUND!!

It's located in France!!

I made a thread on Twitter explaining the full story and how I even asked Ian Worrel and Alex Hirsch about it, but lemme run down quickly how it was found and where it is!

After 3 years of searching with some friends on and off, we had no real luck. I've been working on a video about it for a while but decided to try one more time. My friend @trickengf suggested looking at international logos as they may have more of the image available and sure enough...we found logos like the Japanese and Russian GF logo had more visible detail of the image.

From that, Tricken made a remake of the image and used it to find it. He ended up finding the source at about 3AM for me, lol!

My friend Fried Oreos then confirmed the image was old enough to fit the criteria of pre GF pilot, by determining the image was on the Textures website it was sourced from since 2008!

Then, my friend Alex M managed to buy the HD image and we were able to analyze its metadata for more info!

Turns out, the image, called "LandscapeMountains0009," was taken by a Nikon D70 camera on April 18, 2007!

THE GRAVITY FALLS LOGO IMAGE IS ALMOST 18 YEARS OLD!!

From there, we began looking for the location. The meta data had no location, but other images taken around the same time showed signs of maybe the location being in Europe.

After over a day of searching, Tricken, Alex M and Oreos FOUND IT!!

The location of the image is a mountain range near the town of Sers, France...near the border with Spain.

Exact coordinates of the closest viewable angle of the image is 42°54'23.2"N 0°06'05.6"E

This is a major discovery and one I cannot believe we did. While this search was started by me in 2021 with some friends, it was TrickenGF, Alex M and Fried Oreos who deserve all the credit for this discovery! They were the geniuses who tracked all of this down and were able to connect the dots to get to this point.

You guys are amazing and I am beyond grateful for all of this.

Finding this image means that fans can now recreate the Gravity Falls logo as they want with anything they want. For example, Tricken made this for me using the image :D

Or, you can do this, lol

We now have it!

For 12 years as we looked at the Gravity Falls logo...we were in reality looking at a mountain in France...NOT Oregon!

So, I guess this is a major W for France but sorry, Pacific Northwest, Gravity Falls is actually French, lol!

I still can't believe we found this. I'm so happy :P

[majorcharacterundeath]

i dont think SecUnit writes fic. i think it posts incredibly detailed analysis on the characters, plot, ect (it posts the data it compiled linking hatch shapes to danger, for example). it makes video compilations and the occasional AMV. it comments tiny nitpick corrections on other peoples' forum arguments and sometimes fics. it occasionally leaves long insightful comments on fic. it betas a little. mostly theres a thread on the Sanctuary Moon forum where people can get their fics and meta posts fact checked. its username is something like username1823691 and it uses the same one on every site

ART writes 100k+ word fanfics (SecUnit betas). it gets into arguments on the forums a lot and baits ppl into getting themselves banned. it writes a lot of long posts about the portrayl of bots and constructs in media. its posts on SecUnits r very impassioned and imply it knows more than one personally or. well one day it gets out the Preservation SecUnit from the news a few years ago loves Sanctuary Moon. so a lot of people obviously assumes thats who ART is. it uses a different username on every site where the first letters of the words spell ART (ie: ArtificialRefractorTorid, AliasRedTank)

[socialistexan]

Some things I think people are overlooking in the tiktok ban bill, because it's not just a tiktok ban:

It gives the US government the ability to ban *any* app, website, or company they believe to be "controlled" by an "adversarial power" which can change whenever they want

It allows the President and the Administrative branch almost unilateral power to designate *any* app, website, or company to be under the control of an "adversarial power" (and just think about how that can be used un the hands of, say, Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis)

They have to offer little to no evidence for this. For example, tiktok - a Singaporean-headquartered and ran company, partially owned by US interests, incorporated in the Cayman Islands, and whose userdata is stored Austin, TX - is apparently controlled by the Chinese government

It also gives the Federal Government the ability to investigate and shut down any provider who gives access to these banned websites or services, including VPN. They will have unilateral power to dismantle VPNs through outrageous fines what will essentially force them to not operate in the US

A lot of the Congressional Representatives who supported this bill have large donors and/or stock in US Tech companies like Meta, Google, or Palantier who would benefit from the downfall of tiktok or the ability to purchase it and monopolize the market

Those same tech companies which sell our data constantly anyway, including to "adversarial powers"

This is so much more than just a tiktok ban.

[anaquariusfox]

I spent the evening looking into this AI shit and made a wee informative post of the information I found and thought all artists would be interested and maybe help yall?

edit: forgot to mention Glaze and Nightshade to alter/disrupt AI from taking your work into their machines. You can use these and post and it will apparently mess up the AI and it wont take your content into it's machine!

edit: ArtStation is not AI free! So make sure to read that when signing up if you do! (this post is also on twt)

[Image descriptions: A series of infographics titled: “Opt Out AI: [Social Media] and what I found.” The title image shows a drawing of a person holding up a stack of papers where the first says, ‘Terms of Service’ and the rest have logos for various social media sites and are falling onto the floor. Long transcriptions follow.

Instagram/Meta (I have to assume Facebook).

Hard for all users to locate the “opt out” options. The option has been known to move locations.

You have to click the opt out link to submit a request to opt out of the AI scraping. *You have to submit screenshots of your work/face/content you posted to the app, is curretnly being used in AI. If you do not have this, they will deny you.

Users are saying after being rejected, are being “meta blocked”

People’s requests are being accepted but they still have doubts that their content won’t be taken anyways.

Twitter/X

As of August 2023, Twitter’s ToS update:

“Twitter has the right to use any content that users post on its platform to train its AI models, and that users grant Twitter a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to do so.”

There isn’t much to say. They’re doing the same thing Instagram is doing (to my understanding) and we can’t even opt out.

Tumblr

They also take your data and content and sell it to AI models.

But you’re in luck!

It is very simply to opt out (Wow. Thank Gods)

Opt out on Desktop: click on your blog > blog settings > scroll til you see visibility options and it’ll be the last option to toggle

Out out of Mobile: click your blog > scroll then click visibility > toggle opt out option

TikTok

I took time skim their ToS and under “How We Use Your Information” and towards the end of the long list: “To train and improve our technology, such as our machine learning models and algorithms.”

Regarding data collected; they will only not sell your data when “where restricted by applicable law”. That is not many countries. You can refuse/disable some cookies by going into settings > ads > turn off targeted ads.

I couldn’t find much in AI besides “our machine learning models” which I think is the same thing.

What to do?

In this age of the internet, it’s scary! But you have options and can pick which are best for you!

Accepting these platforms collection of not only your artwork, but your face! And not only your faces but the faces of those in your photos. Your friends and family. Some of those family members are children! Some of those faces are minors! I shudder to think what darker purposes those faces could be used for.

Opt out where you can! Be mindful and know the content you are posting is at risk of being loaded to AI if unable to opt out.

Fully delete (not archive) your content/accounts with these platforms. I know it takes up to 90 days for instagram to “delete” your information. And even keep it for “legal” purposes like legal prevention.

Use lesser known social media platforms! Some examples are; Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, et. As well as art platforms: Artfol, Cara, ArtStation, etc.

The last drawing shows the same person as the title saying, ‘I am, by no means, a ToS autistic! So feel free to share any relatable information to these topics via reply or qrt!

I just wanted to share the information I found while searching for my own answers cause I’m sure people have the same questions as me.’ \End description] (thank you @a-captions-blog!)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Trump can’t do ANYTHING for his base

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on THURSDAY (May 15) at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Trump's coalition includes a huge number of people who will suffer terribly from his policies, but who voted for him anyway. Trumpism requires that he find ways to keep those Christmas-voting turkeys happy, or at least distracted.

Trump's go-to move for keeping his base happy is inflicting pain on people they hate, like immigrants, racialized people, queers and women. That goes a long way, obviously: there's a kind of person who can be distracted from their own deteriorating material condition by the spectacle of cruel treatment for their enemies.

But Trumpism can't just run on sadism. There's a lot of people who enjoy the sadism, but not so much that it cancels out their own rage at their deteriorating personal conditions. Trump's main tactic is to blame the suffering of his base on the rest of us: "radical leftists," "wokeism" and other hobgoblins of the small-minded. That, too, has its limits – especially when Trump controls Congress, the courts, the senate and the White House. Obviously, Trump isn't above blaming his own people for being traitors (e.g., by sending a literal noose-bearing lynch mob after his own vice president), but there are limits to this, even for Trump. If all the power-brokers in Trump's coalitions are branded as disloyal, cowardly, or traitorous, Trump will have no one left to do the actual work of advancing his agenda.

Ultimately, keeping Trump's base happy requires providing some form of material benefit to that base. Every authoritarian has a version of this – like the cash handouts that Poland's former far-right government gave out:

https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/poland-model-promoting-family-values-cash-handouts

For Trump, this presents a problem: because he represents the interests of exploitation, extraction and looting, everything nice that he gives to everyday people in his base potentially gores the ox of someone who really matters to him. It's no surprise, for example, that he reversed Biden's price-cuts for Big Pharma's most expensive drugs – the cheaper drugs are for sick people, the less profitable they'll be for pharma companies:

https://www.levernews.com/trump-already-disarmed-the-war-on-drug-prices/

Luckily (for Trump), Biden's consumer protection and antitrust agencies teed up a long list of extremely good policies that would directly shift money from rich parasites to everyday people. For example, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that would make it very easy to find out which bank would charge you the least and pay you the most, and let you switch banks with one click:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/01/bankshot/#personal-financial-data-rights

It was a move that would have shifted $667m/year from banks to everyday people, every year, forever. But Trump's most important barons, like Elon Musk, hated the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and insisted that it be shuttered, so that $667m/year will go to the banks after all – indeed, virtually all of the good things Biden's CFPB decreed the American public would enjoy henceforth have been destroyed. Sure, Trump would have liked to have taken credit for these, but the conflict between stolen valor and displeasing Shadow President Musk will always cash out in Musk's favor.

It's not just the CFPB. The FTC also set up a whole roster of ambitious projects to improve life for Americans. Some of these made the news in a big way, like the antitrust case against Meta:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/18/chatty-zucky/#is-you-taking-notes-on-a-criminal-fucking-conspiracy

Trump has lots of upsides from pursuing the Meta case. Everyone hates Meta products, including (especially) the people who are trapped using them because that's where their friends, family, communities, customers or audiences are. Breaking up Meta would be hugely popular with the American people. But also, once a court has convicted Meta of violating antitrust law, Trump can solicit favors – cash and favorable algorithmic treatment – from Meta in exchange for ordering his FTC to go easy on Meta in the "remedy phase," letting them off with a fine, rather than forcing them to spin out Whatsapp and Instagram:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/12/the-enemy-of-your-enemy/#is-your-enemy

But even if Trump lets Meta walk, there's plenty of great stuff Biden's FTC did that he could take credit for – policies that would help everyday people.

The most prominent of these is the FTC's "Click to Cancel" rule. It's a pretty simple rule: companies have to make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it was to sign up for it.

In other words, they can't do that thing – beloved of everything from the New York Times to every manosphere influencer's supplement business – where you can sign up for a subscription with one click, but you can't cancel unless you phone them, wait on hold, and beg them to let you off the hook.

Companies do this on purpose, because it's super profitable. Amazon executives carried on internal email threads where they straight up said that they'd deliberately made it confusingly easy to sign up for Prime and basically impossible to stop paying for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

This is a no-brainer. Companies make signing up for subscriptions into a greased slide, and they make canceling subscriptions into a greased pole.

No wonder, then, that when the FTC solicited public comments on a proposed "click to cancel" rule, they had no trouble building up the evidentiary record needed to pass the rule.

Now, Trump's FTC has announced that they are delaying enforcement of the rule until mid-July:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/10/ftc-delays-enforcement-of-click-to-cancel-rule/

This is the second time they've delayed enforcement (originally, the rule was supposed to go into effect in January). Trump FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson had no trouble getting the votes for the suspension, because he illegally fired the two Democratic Commissioners, Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter:

https://www.theverge.com/decoder-podcast-with-nilay-patel/657115/ftc-bedoya-slaughter-trump-fired-supreme-court-interview

Ferguson is proof that the FTC can't do anything material for Trump's base. Sure, he can set up a snitch-line so tht FTC employees can rat each other out for being "woke":

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-statement-emergency-motion.pdf

This should be a slam dunk. It epitomizes the "unfair and deceptive" business practices Section 5 of the FTC Act empowers the agency to snuff out. The Trump admin is unwilling to gore the ox of out-and-out scammers, people who trick you into unkillable subscriptions. It seems that there's no material benefit that Trump's oligarch backers are willing to cede to working people. All they can offer is cruelty.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/12/greased-slide/#greased-pole

Image: Vis M (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slide_at_Thenmala_deer_rehabilitation_center.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[clouds-of-wings]

Large language models like those offered by OpenAI and Google famously require vast troves of training data to work. The latest versions of these models have already scoured much of the existing internet which has led some to fear there may not be enough new data left to train future iterations. Some prominent voices in the industry, like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have posited a solution to that data dilemma: simply train new AI systems on old AI outputs. 

But new research suggests that cannibalizing of past model outputs would quickly result in strings of babbling AI gibberish and could eventually lead to what’s being called “model collapse.” In one example, researchers fed an AI a benign paragraph about church architecture only to have it rapidly degrade over generations. The final, most “advanced” model simply repeated the phrase “black@tailed jackrabbits” continuously.

A study published in Nature this week put that AI-trained-on-AI scenario to the test. The researchers made their own language model which they initially fed original, human-generated text. They then made nine more generations of models, each trained on the text output generated by the model before it. The end result in the final generation was nonessential surrealist-sounding gibberish that had essentially nothing to do with the original text. Over time and successive generations, the researchers say their model “becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality.” 

[tonguetyd]

I know this website has a very overall negative view of TikTok, and I do understand why, but if I may offer up an alternate view?

TikTok was a place you could grow community. It was a place you could spread information (and yes, also plenty of disinformation) and reach people and organize and share ideas. And you didn’t have to have money or already have influence or fame. You just had to be funny or talented or unique (or bigoted and abrasive).

It was everyone’s platform. The way Twitter was. The way YouTube was. Fuck, the way VINE was.

Notice all of those sites are in past tense. Because now TikTok is just another example of how we have lost the internet.

Because with ALL of these sites, once people realize they have power to disrupt the system, they are made unusable. Either through ads or through bots or in this case, through outright government intervention.

If it was really about the data management, Temu would be banned. Meta and Google would be banned, or at least scaled back. (It’s ok when American companies use data unethically, just not China. And it’s ok if China is selling us stuff.) (This is not a defense of either Temu nor Meta/Google. All of these are bad. I’m just pointing out, the only site facing ban is the one people are using to speak out on Palestine about.)

Despite its many, many, irrefutable flaws, TikTok was the first place the internet had in a LONG time where anyone could blow up from. It revolutionized how music was discovered (pros and cons), businesses took off, people who had never been given a voice HAD a voice. It connected people who would not have been connected.

I won’t miss TikTok, specifically. I WILL miss yet another example of a virtual third space taken from us. In the same way I miss how the internet used to be.

[rediimere]

The leaked “AI Aloy” footage from Sony has left such a bitter taste in my mouth that, hours later, I’m still fuming and have even more words to say about the overall sinister nature of its implications.

Let's talk about it.

I want to start by saying that there is a difference between what is colloquially called "AI" as a tool for artists and developers in which their software uses their own sources to streamline the process (for example, the "Content Aware" fill tool that has been present in Photoshop for at least a decade), and "generative AI/genAI" that relies on unauthorised theft of resources to artificially splice data together based on prompts. I have no qualms with the former as it relies on being fed its own sources and is an aid for specific purposes. It is not artificial intelligence, but a tool. GenAI, on the other hand, is immoral, unethical, planet-destroying garbage.

The latter is what is being pushed in that egregious video footage. It is the epitome of tone-deaf, soulless, capitalistic wet dream, dangerously misogynistic slop and I am not exaggerating. And I think it's also the culmination of years of fandom culture being integrated by people who have never interacted in fandom, never bothered to learn the etiquette of a space that existed long before they joined, demanded changes for their comfort, and see it as another commodity.

I'm not the first to say this and others before me have been far smarter about it, but there has been a marked change in fandom culture the past few years. Many have said it goes back to COVID, when people generally not involved in fandom spaces joined because they had nothing else to do.

The thing about fandom is that for pretty much as long as it's existed, it has been a safe space for marginalised voices. It's no coincidence that the transformative works of fandom—fiction, art, meta, etc.—have been places for queer voices, for women, for people of colour, for the trans and nonbinary community, etc. With more people joining, these safe spaces have become less so. There are demands for people to "stop shipping" characters that aren't a canon, established ship. There are personal and threatening attacks on people who have a different viewpoint on a character or plot. People have been stalked. People have been doxxed. This isn't necessary new, but is happening with increased frequency and ferocity, especially by younger members and the terfy crowd. The safe space fandom provided marginalised voices really seems to be shrinking.

Outside of fandom culture itself, there is a rising trend of needing instant gratification, of sacrificing unique protagonists for the sake of "relatability" and "self-inserts." There are readers who ignore descriptions of female protagonists and male love interests in romance books so that they can self-insert (and others are calling for authors to stop describing entirely). There are booktok-ers who, believe it or not, complain about the amount of words on a page. I'm not saying their opinions are wrong in general—there is a market for what they seek—but their reviews are to encourage these stipulations to become the norm. And these influencers get enough engagement that their views are seen as profitable by the corporations and execs in charge.

So it isn't really surprising that now fandom is being seen as something that corporation can milk for all its capitalistic worth. Why wouldn't corporations invade a space they've ignored for years as inconsequential now that it's mainstream? After all, fandom was just full of the "weirdos" before, and now it's full of "normies!" This is a space that has been established for decades, built from the ground up by people who value the source material(s), now full of anyone and everyone who will soak up one morsel of customized instant gratification for the dopamine hit.

And that's where genAI comes in.

Why is this so sinister in regards to Sony's recent leaked footage using AI Aloy interacting with a user?

First off: It's Aloy.

Look, if you've perused my social media or interacted with me online at all, you know I love Horizon. My computer room is full of fan-made merch. I've written almost a million words of fanfiction in three years. I've drawn fanart. I helped construct a fanmade dating sim. Horizon has been a huge part of my life for the past three years.

I'm not ignorant of its flaws. I'm also aware of the fact that Horizon is often hated as an IP, and Aloy is the target of a lot of rage from certain audiences. Not to generalise, but let's be clear: the complaints are largely about Horizon being "woke DEI garbage" (you know, for having a queer female protagonist, for featuring other women and queer characters in prominent roles, for having people of colour be important in the story, for being anti-capitalist and pro-environmentalism, etc.—the same tired, ignorant arguments we've all heard), and about Aloy being "fat" and "looking like a man" (hopefully they stretch before that reach so they don't pull something).

So why would Sony use Aloy to showcase an AI conversation instead of someone like Kratos or Joel, who come from more popular and acclaimed IPs?

One possibility is Sony trying to sink Horizon or Guerrilla Games as a company, spurring so much backlash from the leak that the franchise is doomed and dropped so Guerrilla either goes under or focuses on old IPs like Killzone.

Or the more disgusting possibility is that something like genAI is made for the people who loudly and proudly proclaim how "anti-woke" they are, who have detested Horizon and Aloy from the beginning, and now they have a way to "like" Aloy. They have a way to make her say or do or react to whatever kinds of depravity they want to throw at her. They have a way to control and manipulate a fictional woman to fulfill their own incel agenda.

On top of that—Horizon? The video game about how a defective AI made by a trillionaire wiped out humanity? The sequel that revealed another rogue AI made by thousand-year-old billionaires is set to wipe out Earth again? That Horizon franchise is what Sony is using to showcase AI slop? Let's not even go into how the character responses are literally so painfully out of character they can't be taken seriously at all. The irony is so heavy-handed it's almost crushing.

The other reprehensible part of this is the fact that video game actors are still on strike, and this strike is to protect themselves from being replaced by AI. This test footage did sound like a messed up Siri, but Ashly Burch (Aloy's actress) has been in support of the strike. The insult of using her character to showcase this slop is beyond words.

All I will say in conclusion is that I genuinely hope this is not endorsed, supported, or aided by Guerrilla Games. If this plays any part in Horizon 3 or any future part of the franchise, I speak for myself but can confidently say I am out.

In conclusion please do not support any genAI slop, especially in fandom spaces. Make them know it is not wanted, not needed, and is in fact detested and will lose them money in the end.

On that happy note I'm off to bed.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jesse Singal

Published: Jun 27, 2024

In April Hilary Cass, a British paediatrician, published her review of gender-identity services for children and young people, commissioned by NHS England. It cast doubt on the evidence base for youth gender medicine. This prompted the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organisation for the doctors and practitioners who provide services to trans people, to release a blistering rejoinder. WPATH said that its own guidelines were sturdier, in part because they were “based on far more systematic reviews”.

Systematic reviews should evaluate the evidence for a given medical question in a careful, rigorous manner. Such efforts are particularly important at the moment, given the feverish state of the American debate on youth gender medicine, which is soon to culminate in a Supreme Court case challenging a ban in Tennessee. The case turns, in part, on questions of evidence and expert authority.

Court documents recently released as part of the discovery process in a case involving youth gender medicine in Alabama reveal that WPATH's claim was built on shaky foundations. The documents show that the organisation’s leaders interfered with the production of systematic reviews that it had commissioned from the Johns Hopkins University Evidence-Based Practice Centre (EPC) in 2018.

From early on in the contract negotiations, WPATH expressed a desire to control the results of the Hopkins team’s work. In December 2017, for example, Donna Kelly, an executive director at PATH, told Karen Robinson, the EPC's director, that the WPATH board felt the EPC researchers “cannot publish their findings independently”. A couple of weeks later, Ms Kelly emphasised that, “the [WPATH] board wants it to be clear that the data cannot be used without WPATH approval”.

Ms Robinson saw this as an attempt to exert undue influence over what was supposed to be an independent process. John Ioannidis of Stanford University, who co-authored guidelines for systematic reviews, says that if sponsors interfere or are allowed to veto results, this can lead to either biased summaries or suppression of unfavourable evidence. Ms Robinson sought to avoid such an outcome. “In general, my understanding is that the university will not sign off on a contract that allows a sponsor to stop an academic publication,” she wrote to Ms Kelly.

Months later, with the issue still apparently unresolved, Ms Robinson adopted a sterner tone. She noted in an email in March 2018 that, “Hopkins as an academic institution, and I as a faculty member therein, will not sign something that limits academic freedom in this manner,” nor “language that goes against current standards in systematic reviews and in guideline development”.

Not to reason XY

Eventually WPATH relented, and in May 2018 Ms Robinson signed a contract granting WPATH power to review and offer feedback on her team’s work, but not to meddle in any substantive way. After WPATH leaders saw two manuscripts submitted for review in July 2020, however, the parties’ disagreements flared up again. In August the WPATH executive committee wrote to Ms Robinson that WPATH had “many concerns” about these papers, and that it was implementing a new policy in which WPATH would have authority to influence the EPC team’s output—including the power to nip papers in the bud on the basis of their conclusions.

Ms Robinson protested that the new policy did not reflect the contract she had signed and violated basic principles of unfettered scientific inquiry she had emphasised repeatedly in her dealings with WPATH. The Hopkins team published only one paper after WPATH implemented its new policy: a 2021 meta-analysis on the effects of hormone therapy on transgender people. Among the recently released court documents is a WPATH checklist confirming that an individual from WPATH was involved “in the design, drafting of the article and final approval of [that] article”. (The article itself explicitly claims the opposite.) Now, more than six years after signing the agreement, the EPC team does not appear to have published anything else, despite having provided WPATH with the material for six systematic reviews, according to the documents.

No one at WPATH or Johns Hopkins has responded to multiple inquiries, so there are still gaps in this timeline. But an email in October 2020 from WPATH figures, including its incoming president at the time, Walter Bouman, to the working group on guidelines, made clear what sort of science WPATH did (and did not) want published. Research must be “thoroughly scrutinised and reviewed to ensure that publication does not negatively affect the provision of transgender health care in the broadest sense,” it stated. Mr Bouman and one other coauthor of that email have been named to a World Health Organisation advisory board tasked with developing best practices for transgender medicine.

Another document recently unsealed shows that Rachel Levine, a transwoman who is assistant secretary for health, succeeded in pressing WPATH to remove minimum ages for the treatment of children from its 2022 standards of care. Dr Levine’s office has not commented. Questions remain unanswered, but none of this helps WPATH’s claim to be an organisation that bases its recommendations on science. 

[ Via: https://archive.today/wJCI7 ]

--

==

So, there are 6 completed reviews sitting somewhere, that WPATH knows shows undesirable (to them) results. And they know it. And despite - or perhaps, because of - that, they wrote the insane SOC8 anyway. And then, at the behest of Rachel Levine, went back and took out the age limits, making it even more insane.

This isn't how science works, it's how a cult works.

When John Templeton Foundation commissioned a study on the efficacy of intercessory prayer, a study which unsurprisingly found that it's completely ineffective, it was forced to publish the negative results.

So, even the religious are more ethical than gender ideologues when it comes to science. This is outright scientific corruption.

[duckprintspress]

Just used this template from the Author's Guild to send this letter (I edited/expanded on the template.)

I am writing to you as an indie publisher. I have discovered three of our books, including the work almost 30 creators, in the data you used to train your generative AI model. This usage was not authorized and violates both the Press's copyright and the authors' and artists' whose work was included. The books in question are Hockey Bois by A. L. Heard, And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," and Many Drops Make a Stream by A. L. Heard. This letter is to put you on notice that you do not have the right to use my work to train your AI models. You must obtain express permission and provide reasonable licensing terms for authors’ works. I hope you will set an example of responsible, legal, ethical AI use by obtaining permission before using authors’ and journalists’ works going forward and compensating us for the use you have already made. I'd say thank you for your time, but honestly I hate that I have to worry about this, hate that I have to take my own time to write this, and hate that generative AI-loving technocrats are actively destroying the arts in supposed pursuit of creating the arts. So I don't really thank you for anything. Please stop it, and if you refuse to, at least you can pay us with the billions of dollars you've earned by preying on the rest of the world. Claire Houck Owner, Duck Prints Press

The Author's Guild wrote up a list of actionable steps that authors whose work has been stolen can take, so I'll be looking at that more to see what, if anything, else I can do. Several require membership in the Guild, tho, and that's not happening right now. This is US-oriented info.

[mariacallous]

The Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission has removed four years’ worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency’s landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft. More than 300 blogs were removed.

On the FTC’s website, the page hosting all of the agency’s business-related blogs and guidance no longer includes any information published during former president Joe Biden’s administration, current and former FTC employees, who spoke under anonymity for fear of retaliation, tell WIRED. These blogs contained advice from the FTC on how big tech companies could avoid violating consumer protection laws.

One now deleted blog, titled “Hey, Alexa! What are you doing with my data?” explains how, according to two FTC complaints, Amazon and its Ring security camera products allegedly leveraged sensitive consumer data to train the ecommerce giant’s algorithms. (Amazon disagreed with the FTC’s claims.) It also provided guidance for companies operating similar products and services. Another post titled “$20 million FTC settlement addresses Microsoft Xbox illegal collection of kids’ data: A game changer for COPPA compliance” instructs tech companies on how to abide by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by using the 2023 Microsoft settlement as an example. The settlement followed allegations by the FTC that Microsoft obtained data from children using Xbox systems without the consent of their parents or guardians.

“In terms of the message to industry on what our compliance expectations were, which is in some ways the most important part of enforcement action, they are trying to just erase those from history,” a source familiar tells WIRED.

Another removed FTC blog titled “The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust” outlines how businesses could avoid creating chatbots that violate the FTC Act’s rules against unfair or deceptive products. This blog won an award in 2023 for “excellent descriptions of artificial intelligence.”

The Trump administration has received broad support from the tech industry. Big tech companies like Amazon and Meta, as well as tech entrepreneurs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, all donated to Trump’s inauguration fund. Other Silicon Valley leaders, like Elon Musk and David Sacks, are officially advising the administration. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employs technologists sourced from Musk’s tech companies. And already, federal agencies like the General Services Administration have started to roll out AI products like GSAi, a general-purpose government chatbot.

The FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED.

Removing blogs raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act, one former FTC official tells WIRED. During the Biden administration, FTC leadership would place “warning” labels above previous administrations’ public decisions it no longer agreed with, the source said, fearing that removal would violate the law.

Since President Donald Trump designated Andrew Ferguson to replace Khan as FTC chair in January, the Republican regulator has vowed to leverage his authority to go after big tech companies. Unlike Khan, however, Ferguson’s criticisms center around the Republican party’s long-standing allegations that social media platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, censor conservative speech online. Before being selected as chair, Ferguson told Trump that his vision for the agency also included rolling back Biden-era regulations on artificial intelligence and tougher merger standards, The New York Times reported in December.

In an interview with CNBC last week, Ferguson argued that content moderation could equate to an antitrust violation. “If companies are degrading their product quality by kicking people off because they hold particular views, that could be an indication that there's a competition problem,” he said.

Sources speaking with WIRED on Tuesday claimed that tech companies are the only groups who benefit from the removal of these blogs.

“They are talking a big game on censorship. But at the end of the day, the thing that really hits these companies’ bottom line is what data they can collect, how they can use that data, whether they can train their AI models on that data, and if this administration is planning to take the foot off the gas there while stepping up its work on censorship,” the source familiar alleges. “I think that's a change big tech would be very happy with.”

[foone]

One thing I think about a lot is that how omegaverse is a sort of meta-setting that can and has been applied to many different fandoms, right?

So there's "omegaverse supernatural" (because that's where it started) and "omegaverse star trek" and "omegaverse Frasier" and "omegaverse Batman" and "omegaverse US presidents".

You can basically easily apply it to any fandom with lots of men in it, which turns out to be most of them. (and you can apply it to the rare female-majority fandoms with a bit of extra work).

But the interesting thing to me is that omegaverse depends on characters having subgenders: alpha/beta/omega are effectively gender roles on top of the regular male/female ones, but they're ones not specified in the original fiction, right? (I mean, not usually).

So like, you can watch NewsRadio and it makes it pretty clear Dave is a man, but it never specifies if he's an alpha or omega, because why would it? Also, why is my go-to example of a random sitcom one from 1995?

Anyway. So you've got a bunch of characters with canonical genders (not that that has ever stopped fans from headcanoning them as different! Dave is a trans man, Lisa is a trans woman, and Bill? All Phil Hartman characters are closeted trans women, so jot that down), but you don't have canonical subgenders.

So fans have to decide which characters in a fiction are alphas and omegas and so on. They tend to be pretty consistent for most characters, actually.

But the part that interests me despite not really reading omegaverse stuff is just those headcanons.

Like, I can take a show I know well, like say Star Trek: The Next Generation, and find out what the fans think their subgenders are.

Like, I'm gonna guess that Riker and Worf are alphas. Picard could go either way. LaForge is an omega, Data is... An android, but he's had sex, so... I'm gonna guess alpha? O'Brien is an omega, but that's mostly going off DS9. Maybe he wasn't in TNG yet? Wesley I'm guessing gets headcanoned as omega.

And see, now I can go look at ao3 and see what other people think for these! And for some reason that's way more interesting to me than just reading any omegaverse fic.

I think we should do more of this sort of shit. I mean, I guess we kinda do for things like top/bottom, dom/sub, trans/cis, but I demand more subgenders! Subgenders that aren't depicted in the fiction but fans have to headcanon.

I kinda want to make a sort of wiki website which works by scraping ao3 tags and assigning alpha/beta/omega to characters from shows, basically a fan vote on how people headcanon the subgenders of these characters.

Anyway I checked and oh boy yeah everyone says Wesley is an omega. Apparently Zefram Cochrane is an omega too.

And the one fic I saw with Data in it made him an omega. Huh. Interesting.

I dunno. It's weird: I've got no interest in reading a fic where these characters fuck in their weird omegaverse ways, but I can't not be interested in knowing how fans headcanon them.

[amethystfairy1]

I have a question about Docs robotic arm, and I can't remember if it's ever been talked about or answered (sorry if it has lol), but can it feel (or register) pain?

Now, obviously I'm assuming it can't necessarily get hurt (outside of literally harming the metal/redstone anyway), and im pretty sure it's been stated that Doc would handle baby Tango whenever he got too hot because his metal arm wouldn't get hurt, but, can it register pain, per se?

Say, for example, his arm encounters high levels of heat, the arm doesn't actually get affected, he himself probably doesn't get affected much assuming the heat stays concentrated on his arm, but is he aware that it hurts? Is his brain firing pain signals to a limb that can't process them (or vice versa)? Does his arm maybe take in data, and relay to his archival eye that there are high levels of heat near/on his arm? So no pain is registered, but rather the heat (and or presence of what should be pain) itself?

And, lastly, in the event none of that is true, could the metal itself heat up enough to the point it would hurt his actual skin? Could his shoulder/back/neck get hurt where the grafted metal plates meet skin if his arm was hot enough? (I highly doubt it but if theres any Meta Runner fans reading this think Lucinia's arm lol. That arm definitely burned her in the explosion. Anyway im getting off track whoops)

Sorry for the long ask, that may not even make sense, and has potentially been answered/talked about before lol. (And or sorry for making you think things that havent been/wouldn't normally be thunk) Feel free to not even answer this I'll probably forget about it in a couple hours (i really need to get to sleep man. So eepy) But uh. Love your writing and hope you're blessed with the cold side of your pillow tonight <3

It doesn't register pain in the traditional sense, no. He does get phantom pains from the absence of his actual arm, though! He also does do the data registration thing that you mention! So for example of he's holding a crying lil Tango and Tango is heating up, his arm will register the high heat and relay that info to his archival eye, but he won't feel like he's being burned. Also yes, it could get hot enough to burn his skin, buuuuut that heat would have to be extremely high. He's held Tango during a panic attack and that hasn't been able to do it. So while it's possible, it's very unlikely to ever actually happen. Hope that makes sense! I'm so glad you enjoy my writing!

[vldunchartedregions]

cannot wait for the meta! i already know you guys are gonna give me the closure i need after so many years of yearning for the happy and satisfying end all these wonderful characters deserved... thanks to the team for taking on this enormous task of sifting through the whole show and compiling the data! also i rly hope someone is going to be insane enough to use your findings to write a fanfic about the alleged original s8 and if not i might just go and do it myself...

Gosh, thank you so much!! This really warmed the team's heart. 🥺

Our team also wants to express that the fandom love has been incredible.

Again, if we got some of it wrong, at least we had fun doing (essentially) investigative journalism.

It's just a theory based on deep analysis, sources providing us information, and rewatching the episodes over and over.

Oh, and the Feud's been a massive help cementing some of the pieces together.

We also feel like it's been many, many years since the final season came out (Can you believe it's almost been TEN? Wild) that the fandom might be at a place to look at the alleged original ending and see brand new information in a new light.

For example, Knights of Lights:

Cough.

Whether our information is received positively or not, is a different discussion point altogether. But! We'll walk that bridge when we get there.

To reiterate, our intention is to hopefully bring some empathy to the table with the crew and talent that worked on this incredible show.

It helps tremendously when you have amazing people on our team that works in specialised fields, including but not limited to... IP holder relationships.

We might be able to bring a new perspective to the table, and that's all we can account for. All we ask is some patience, love and kindness as we navigate through uncharted waters.

Dare I say, uncharted regions.

Speaking of, isn't it funny when you remove a filter and suddenly an apparition in the shape of a Lion appears in a time clock in front of the whole team at the end of the Uncharted Regions episode?

In front of the whole team too? The blue lion too, who isn't even out on the field yet? The red lion is nowhere to be found and therefore must be in this time clock?

Man, wonder what happened there... (can't wait to talk about this one in more detail) ☕️

Thank you for your lovely message!

[therealvinelle]

I’ve been going down a little rabbit hole of Twilight today, found your blog and have been thoroughly enjoying your meta on Bella and Renesmee’s powers. Do you have any thoughts on what their powers could truly be classified as? Like, Bella makes sense as some sort of self-preservation thing, but Renesmee’s honestly sounds more like mind control.

Thank you!

I don't really love the classification system that's used in Twilight, as it reminds the nerd in me of how unsupervised k-means AI classification will work: it looks at the data points and says "Okay, these are different enough from the rest and similar enough to each other that they're probably related. Alright alright, this cluster must be blue."

You also, when doing this type of classification, want to tell the computer how many categories it's looking for, which depends on the size of the data set, and the type.

It's not a perfect analogy to what Eleazar is doing, but he reminds me more of a k-means cluster than he does Charles von Linné, who was a brilliant biologist who invented the modern system of naming and categorizing organisms that we use today.

He looks at the gifted vampire he is presented, compares it to other gifts he has known, and assigns a similar category if he finds one that's similar. This, famously, leads to such differences as psychic and physical gifts (which to me is such a "Are you a computer trying your best with unlabelled classification? Are you having a hard time?" thing to which the computer would sadly admit "yes :(") where what's assigned a physical gift and what's assigned a psychic gift seems so incredibly arbitrary and contradictory that I can only assume somebody got ahead of themselves with "A and B are similar. B and C are similar. A, B, and C must be the same category!" and now they have a problem.

As an example: Aro and Edward are similar. They both read your mind. They have clear differences, however, as Aro requires physical touch to do so and Edward requires doesn't, while Aro is able to read all the thoughts you've ever had while Edward can read every mind within the area. You can classify them as mind readers, sure. Now you have a category describing "vampire who can read minds".

Demetri, according to Edward himself, is also similar to Edward. They both sense a person's mind, without need of touch. However, Demetri senses location, Edward doesn't, and Edward senses thoughts, Demetri doesn't. Edward is limited by geographical distance, Demetri is limited by one degree of Kevin Bacon. But if we want to classify them, then mind sensing might be the best way to do so. Both can stand in a room and, without moving a muscle, have a sense of every mind around them and they will gain information others can't.

Aro and Demetri, however, have very little in common. Their common denominator is that it "has to do with the mind".

Now for added difficulty: how do we classify Renesmee? She can by touching people convey her thoughts. This seems to be something she needs to block rather than choose to show, as people can touch her to see her thoughts when she's unconscious.

Is she then in the same category as Aro and Edward, or we create a parent category for "something to do with mind reading" and Aro and Edward are a shared subcategory for reading the minds of others well Renesmee is in sharing her mind, or is Edward off on his own with non-tactile mind-reading while Aro and Renesmee get a shared subcategory for tactile mind-reading-related? Does Demetri belong higher up in the tree, at the "mind sensing" junction before the others split off into the "something to do with mind reading" subtree?

The reason why I ask these questions, is to illustrate how meaningless it all is. There are so few gifted vampires in Twilight that we don't have enough data points to start looking for meaningful classification or similarities. Aro, Demetri, Edward, and Renesmee are all unique, with gifts unique to them. God knows that if my theory that Renesmee's real gift is to make people not want to hurt her, then she's suddenly in the same camp as Renata, who makes people forget what they were doing when they try.

Except Renata's gift is to disorient people when they get physically close, Renesmee's is to make them not want to hurt her in the first place. If we classify them together, then I don't think Renata can be classified as a shield anymore. The impenetrable space around her would only be a materialization of her gift, which is to dissuade attackers from entering that space.

Which brings me to the next point: the so-called psychic vs. physical gift division.

It depends entirely on how you classify these gifts. What makes Jasper and Alice's gifts physical? Jasper can manipulate and sense emotions, how is that different from Alec, Jane, Kate, and Zafrina manipulating your sense reseptors? Alice can see things which may happen, how is that physical if Edward seeing thoughts and Zafrina creating elaborate illusions isn't?

Benjamin, surely, must be physical. Except his gift is the only one of its kind in canon, no similarities to anyone else, which means he proves that vampire gifts can truly be anything and there's no point in trying to classify them in relation to one another when the population is so small and the unknown potential for gifts so vast.

I think I have argued here in favor of tags, or attributes: you identify something a gift can do, and you don't try to draw similarities, for yonder lies nothing but subjective opinion.

Renesmee can be similar to Aro for "shares thoughts by touch", to Jane by "imparts illusions on one individual at a time", potentially to Renata for "dissuades attackers", and is canonically compared to her father's gift. It depends entirely on how you interpret and want to classify their gifts. And sure, you can do that, no one is stopping you from classifying in any way you want, but the trouble is that you now have a system that's extremely vulnerable to expansion and changes to entries.

There's also the matter of usefulness - the tracker category, which encompasses all vampires who are good at finding others, is a useful one. Some vampires will be able to use their gift, whatever it is, to find you, others won't. I respect that category. I also respect calling Aro and Edward mind readers, it's what they are.

What I don't respect is wanting to categorize every gifted vampire, nor attempting larger classification and to cluster them. The similarities are just that, similarities.

Eleazar is overzealous.