From a simple material, Kendra Haste brings us face-to-face with striking sculptures of wild animals. “I try to capture the living, breathing model in a static 3D form and convey its emotional essence without slipping into sentimentality or anthropomorphism," she says.

thisiscolossal.com/2025/06/ken…

#art #nature

How is it legal to have dual citizenship as an elected official??

*that is a rhetorical question*

The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization

Link: lucalp.dev/bitter-lesson-token…
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization

Highlights the desire to replace tokenization with a general method that better leverages compute and data. We'll see tokenization's fragility and review the Byte Latent Transformer arch.

^{⛰️ lucalp}

Welp

gizmodo.com/reddit-to-turn-pos…

Reddit to Turn Positive Posts Into Ads for Brands

And you're not going to get a cut.

^{AJ Dellinger (Gizmodo)}

I don't see a difference between gathering people into rooms to gas them, and gathering people into areas to shoot them.

thecradle.co/articles-id/31548

#Palestine #Gaza

UN officials accuse Israel of 'weaponizing' aid in Gaza as GHF massacres continue

Aid sites operating under a US-backed model are now scenes of repeated massacres, with no pause even amid regional war escalations

^thecradle.co

I am typing this from a ThinkPad E535 laptop.

It is usable from Linux Mint live boot, even with only 4GB memory. Not sure how it will work with Windows 11 (though I may upgrade to 16GB if Windows ends up staying on it).

The A6-4400M CPU isn't that powerful. It could be upgraded to an A8 or A10, but I don't think I have one of those lying around.

This laptop is perfectly fine for retro or minimal type tasks, but would struggle a bit what is expected out of laptops today (as least without upgrades).

I have customers who want laptops under $200 - this certainly would fit that requirement.

#thinkpad #e535

New Heterodorx podcast! Episode 172: Skrmetti Puttanesca heterodorx.substack.com/p/epis…

On June 18 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled on US v. Skrmetti, deciding whether a Tennessee law prohibiting certain medical interventions on youngsters violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. The Hon. Elspeth Cypher (ret.) a.k.a. Judge TERF joins the Dorx to dissect the case, the decision, the concurrences, and the dissents. Which concurrence is best, Thomas’s or Barrett’s? Does Justice Sotomayor suffer from pathological empathy? If Skrmetti were a pasta, what type of sauce would be best on it? Plus Nina mis-sexes Chase Strangio (whoops!), Cori’s gender is Jewish, and Judge TERF solves the crisis in the Middle East.

Episode 172: Skrmetti Puttanesca

Levels of scrutiny, rational basis, merits, and more!

^{Nina Paley (Heterodorx Podcast)}

Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme

Link: dublinlive.ie/news/world-news/…
Discussion: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

Man 'refused entry into US' as border control catch him with bald JD Vance meme

A 21-year-old tourist has described the horrendous treatment he allegedly received after being denied entry to the USA due to a meme depicting JD Vance as bald being found on his phone

^{Dublin Live}

"‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops"
404media.co/fucklapd-com-lets-…

404 Media

2025-06-24 13:43:47

‘FuckLAPD.com’ Lets Anyone Use Facial Recognition to Instantly Identify Cops

A new site, FuckLAPD.com, is using public records and facial recognition technology to allow anyone to identify police officers in Los Angeles they have a picture of. The tool, made by artist Kyle McDonald, is designed to help people identify cops who may otherwise try to conceal their identity, such as covering their badge or serial number.

“We deserve to know who is shooting us in the face even when they have their badge covered up,” McDonald told me when I asked if the site was made in response to police violence during the LA protests against ICE that started earlier this month. “fucklapd.com is a response to the violence of the LAPD during the recent protests against the horrific ICE raids. And more broadly—the failure of the LAPD to accomplish anything useful with over $2B in funding each year.”

“Cops covering up their badges? ID them with their faces instead,” the site, which McDonald said went live this Saturday. The tool allows users to upload an image of a police officer’s face to search over 9,000 LAPD headshots obtained via public record requests. The site says image processing happens on the device, and no photos or data are transmitted or saved on the site. “Blurry, low-resolution photos will not match,” the site says.

“fucklapd.com uses data provided by the City of Los Angeles directly to the public,” McDonald told me in an email. “This data has been provided in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits. That means all of this information belongs to the public and is a matter of public record. fucklapd.com is not scraping any data.”

In addition to potentially identifying officers by name and serial number, FuckLAPD.com also pulls up a police officer’s salary.

“Surprisingly it [the domain name] only costs $10 a year to exercise my first amendment right to say fucklapd.com,” McDonald said.
playlist.megaphone.fm?p=TBIEA2…
I tested the tools by grabbing an image of a white and bald police officer from an LAPD press conference addressing its use of force during the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. I uploaded the image to the site, and within a few seconds the site presented me with nine headshots of officers who could be possible matches, all of them bald white men. The first correctly identified the cop in the image I uploaded.

Clicking “view profile” under the result sent me to the Watch the Watchers site by the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community group based in the Skid Row neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles. “All of the information on this website comes from records that were deliberately made public by the City of Los Angeles in response to either public records requests or public records lawsuits,” the Watch the Watchers site says. “We plan to keep refreshing this data from new public records requests as well as to add other data.” Stop LAPD Spying Coalition is not associated with FuckLAPD.com and did not endorse the site.

McDonald told me that since the site launched, it had around 50,000 visitors, but “Because the analysis happens on-device I have no way of knowing what people are using it for, except for some people who have posted screenshots to Twitter or Instagram,” he said.

In 2018 McDonald made another tool called ICEspy which used hundreds of photos of ICE employees from LinkedIn and does much the same thing as FuckLAPD.com. “This app is designed to highlight and embarrass the organization committing atrocities against refugees and immigrants to the United States,” ICEspy’s website says. That tool originally used a Microsoft API, before Microsoft restricted access to it. McDonald said on X that he recently relaunched the tool to run locally on devices. 404 Media tested ICEspy using images of ICE employees on LinkedIn to verify if the tool worked and each result was incorrect; McDonald indicated on X he was looking for others to re-scrape LinkedIn and update the database.

Over the last few months ICE officers have consistently worn masks, neck gaiters, sunglasses, and baseball caps to shield their identity while often refusing to provide their name or even confirm the agency they belong to. This includes while violently assaulting people, detaining U.S. citizens, and pointing weapons at bystanders, leaving little room for recourse or accountability against the individual agents or the agency.

ICE’s constant use of masks has created a climate where people cannot be sure that the heavily armed group of men coming towards them are really federal agents or not. In Philadelphia, a man pretended to be an ICE agent in order to rob an auto repair shop and zip tie an employee. In Brooklyn, a man posed as an immigration officer before attempting to rape a woman.

ICE claims that assaults against its officers have increased by 413 percent, and use this as the justification for covering their faces. But as Philip Bump showed in the Washington Postthere are still plenty of questions about those numbers and their accuracy. ICE says its officers’ family members have been doxed too.

Neither the LAPD or ICE responded to a request for comment.

Joseph Cox contributed reporting.

'ICE Agent' Pulls Gun on Man Taking Photos of His Car

Activists post footage which also shows suspects being led away by masked agent.

^{Billal Rahman (Newsweek)}

📢 #FaggotTourney SEMIFINALS!

HYPE POST!

It is time for the Adam and CSB voters to come together in solidarity with the SRK voters and but this obnoxious faggot into the finals!

SRK will win if we accentuate the fact that him winning may actually trigger the biggest sperg-out thread in fedi history.

VOTING THREAD WILL BE POSTED TONIGHT!

Stay tuned to this tag for updates: #FaggotTourneyUpdate

People, I'm the last person to minimise the genocidal mass murder Israel is committing in Gaza, but I am a statistician and you should stop quoting this claim that the IDF's own estimates show that 377,000 people in Gaza are unaccounted for or presumably killed.

The link to the original paper on the Harvard Dataverse seems to be down, but a copy is embedded here: 21stcenturywire.com/wp-content…

The calculation compares the pre-war population of 2.227 million with the sum of the IDF's population estimates for the three remaining enclaves outside of its declared evacuation zones. That difference is larger than the current official count of traumatic injury deaths by the repeatedly-quoted 377,000.

Now first of all, note that this is not a finding by the original study author, who doesn't actually address this question at all. They just happen to include some IDF population estimates in their map as ancillary information.

Secondly, note that for Gaza City, the figure is given as “1 mil” (as opposed to, say, “1.0 mil”), indicating it is rounded. So already there could easily be 77,000 or however many people disappearing in that rounding error. It could work in the other direction too, of course, but the point remains that we shouldn't read too much into the number.

Thirdly, the Palestinian ambassador to Egypt has suggested that as many as 100,000 have managed to flee. thenewhumanitarian.org/news-fe…

Finally, the assumption that the population outside of the enclaves, inside the “evacuated" areas, is zero, is known to be false. As a matter of fact, we've been literally objecting that ‘Israel is falsely designating Gaza areas as empty in order to bomb them’ (972mag.com/israel-gaza-empty-n…). The IDF claims areas as “evacuated" if it estimates that less than 20 percent of the population remain. That easily leaves room for tens of thousands, or even a hundred thousand, to still be in those areas.

Maybe the death toll really is 400,000, who knows. But it's simply incorrect to claim that these numbers somehow suggest, never mind establish, that it is, or that the IDF itself has reached that conclusion. These numbers are also perfectly consistent with the total death toll in the 150,000-200,000 range that is suggested by other estimation approaches.

newarab.com/news/israel-disapp…

#Gaza #genocide

Israel 'disappeared' 377,000 people in Gaza, half are children

Over 377,000 people, half of them children, are missing in Gaza since Oct 2023, says Harvard-linked report, pointing to a far higher death toll than reported.

^{The New Arab Staff (The new Arab)}

Catholics believe this verse is God telling them that their church is the one true church of God.

Matthew 16:18
>And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the forces of Hades will not overpower it.

That God is saying that Peter is the rock that Gods church shall be built, so lets examine the usages of the word "Rock" in the bible.

Genesis 49:24
>Yet his bow remained steady, and his strong arms were made agile by the hands of the Mighty One of Jacob, by the name of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel

God (Jesus) is the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel

Numbers 20:8
>“Take the staff and assemble the community. You and your brother Aaron are to speak to the rock while they watch, and it will yield its water. You will bring out water for them from the rock and provide drink for the community and their livestock.”

While this definitely seems to be a literal rock that gives them water, it is also the allegorical rock that is Yahweh that nourishes them.

Deuteronomy 32:3
>For I will proclaim Yahweh’s name. Declare the greatness of our God! 4 The Rock—His work is perfect; all His ways are entirely just. A faithful God, without prejudice, He is righteous and true.

Deuteronomy 32:18
>You ignored the Rock who gave you birth; you forgot the God who gave birth to you.

Deuteronomy 32:30
>How could one man pursue a thousand, or two put ten thousand to flight, unless their Rock had sold them, unless the Lord had given them up? 31 But their “rock” is not like our Rock; even our enemies concede.

Again, Yahweh is "The Rock" (insert Dwayne Johnson jokes).

1 Samuel 2:2
>There is no one holy like the Lord. There is no one besides You! And there is no rock like our God.

2 Samuel 22:2
>He said: The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer,

2 Samuel 22:32
>For who is God besides the Lord? And who is a rock? Only our God.

2 Samuel 22:47
>The Lord lives—may my rock be praised! God, the rock of my salvation, is exalted.

2 Samuel 23:3
>The God of Israel spoke; the Rock of Israel said to me, “The one who rules the people with justice, who rules in the fear of God,

God and "Rock" are synonyms.

Psalm 18:2
>The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer, my God, my mountain where I seek refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

Psalm 18:31
>For who is God besides Yahweh? And who is a rock? Only our God.

Only Yahweh is our Rock. Not Peter.

Psalm 19:14
>May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to You, Lord, my rock and my Redeemer.

Psalm 28:1
>Lord, I call to You; my rock, do not be deaf to me. If You remain silent to me, I will be like those going down to the Pit.

Psalm 31:2
>Listen closely to me; rescue me quickly. Be a rock of refuge for me, a mountain fortress to save me. 3 For You are my rock and my fortress; You lead and guide me because of Your name.

Psalm 42:9
>I will say to God, my rock, “Why have You forgotten me? Why must I go about in sorrow because of the enemy’s oppression?”

Psalm 62:2
>He alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold; I will never be shaken.

Psalm 62:7
>My salvation and glory depend on God, my strong rock. My refuge is in God.

Psalm 71:3
>Be a rock of refuge for me, where I can always go. Give the command to save me, for You are my rock and fortress.

Psalm 78:35
>They remembered that God was their rock, the Most High God, their Redeemer.

Psalm 89:26
>He will call to Me, ‘You are my Father, my God, the rock of my salvation.’

Psalm 92:15
>to declare: “The Lord is just; He is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in Him.”

Psalm 94:22
>But the Lord is my refuge; my God is the rock of my protection.

Psalm 137:8
>Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who pays you back what you have done to us. 9 Happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks.

This one isn't about God, but it makes me happy 😃 Hopefully this is near.

Psalm 144:1
>May the Lord, my rock, be praised, who trains my hands for battle and my fingers for warfare.

Isaiah 30:29
>Your singing will be like that on the night of a holy festival, and your heart will rejoice like one who walks to the music of a flute, going up to the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Israel.

Isaiah 44:8
>Do not be startled or afraid. Have I not told you and declared it long ago? You are my witnesses! Is there any God but Me? There is no other Rock; I do not know any.

NO. OTHER. ROCK.

Habakkuk 1:12
>Are You not from eternity, Yahweh my God? My Holy One, You will not die. Lord, You appointed them to execute judgment; my Rock, You destined them to punish us.

Matthew 7:24
The Two Foundations
>“Therefore, everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them will be like a sensible man who built his house on the rock. 25 The rain fell, the rivers rose, and the winds blew and pounded that house. Yet it didn’t collapse, because its foundation was on the rock.

The foundation is Yahweh.

Quoting Masha Gessen on why the story of antisemitism needs to be rewritten, starting in New York (apropos Zohran Mamdani):

[…] If there is such a thing as correct answers in politics, Mamdani had them. It ought to be uncontroversial for a mayor to focus on his city and for a politician to assert the value of equal rights. But the exchange fueled accusations of antisemitism.

Masha Gessen shows how the definition of #antisemitism has expanded to silence criticism of Israeli actions. Zohran Mamdani faces anti-Muslim slurs and doctored campaign materials all while being labeled antisemitic for supporting equal rights and focusing on local issues. Gessen argues that this conflation undermines understanding of actual antisemitism and creates fear that politicians exploit.

nytimes.com/2025/06/24/opinion… or archive.is/dmpoa

I totally agree with @Naureckas - This is about the #NYT, #WSJ, #BBC and many other Western outlets who historically pushed against any expression of opinion contradicting the established narrative. Is there any other reason why a the BBC never asked Avi Shlaim on any of their shows for commentary? kolektiva.social/@oatmeal/1147…

As an Israeli I’m well aware that most liberal mainstream Western media functions as a propaganda mechanism when it uncritically amplifies pro-Israel narratives when it systematically ignores 77 years of occupation. It’s an absurd that some of them exhibit more deference to Israel than Israeli media such as #Haaretz, which, despite its flaws and position within the establishment that resists peace, at least produces some critical analyses that are noticeably absent form some “liberal” press in the West.

Questioning established narratives invites accusations of “antisemitism”, and in turn allows Israel to break every international law, including those defining the terms of the occupation itself, often obscured with a cynical framing as “conflict” or “terrorism.”

To address this legacy, Western media must acknowledge history and facilitate discussions that may indeed question Israel’s right to exist, as that’s the core of the issue. Palestine’s partition fundamentally contradicted UN charter’s own principles of self-determination, and paved the way for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s majority population in 1948. This displacement of one population while securing overwhelming international support effectively made the Holocaust the Palestinians’ problem rather than Europeans’.

While we cannot undo all of that, we must allow discussions about solutions that consider reality, not only Israel’s anxieties, often expressed through cynical weaponization of the memory of the #Holocaust and antisemitism.​​​​​​​​​​​​​

@palestine
@israel
#GazaGenocide