Birds on a Wire

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

this is the logical conclusion of that same problem. datasets were being trained on white people so computers were unable to tell black people's gender, let alone match them to a name/identity

bonus: the misogyny was baked into the racism

now the queerphobia is baked into the... uh. everything else.

i'm sure if we dig around someone will discover a pattern of disabled people also encountering AI trying to change their words to the language that's been selected, evaluated, and confirmed as the default and desirable patterns

pattern prediction marginalizes literally everyone and everything it hasn't been trained on, and this will only get worse if the training data, value assignment, and fine-tuning of public-facing AIs that are considered "universal" continue to be up to private individuals who see themselves and those like them as the default, and everyone else irrelevant

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews. In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices. The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.

so I built a little snowman on one of the small tables on this strip. 

after about three minutes of cramming ice together, I hear, “Do you want espresso beans for the eyes?” and I turn around and there’s this gal leaning precariously far out the window of her coffee shop, surrounded by her coworkers, holding out her hand and said espresso beans.