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GamerGaters inundated her with death threats. Now some are apologizing — and she forgives them. “Over 100 Gamergaters have written me over the year asking for forgiveness, and I’ve thanked them and forgiven them every single time,” she wrote Tuesday on Twitter. “If I can understand people can grow past their worst moments, I think the rest of us can too.”
posted by panglos at 9:13 PM PST - 141 comments

Thousands of Patients Were Implanted With Heart Pumps That the FDA Knew Could Be Dangerous. (ProPublica, Aug. 5, 2021) As HeartWare and Medtronic [which acquired HeartWare in 2016] failed inspection after inspection and reports of device-related deaths piled up, the FDA relied on the device makers to fix the problems voluntarily rather than compelling them to do so. The HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device [HVAD] was implanted into more than 19,000 patients, the majority of whom got it after the FDA found in 2014 that the device didn’t meet federal standards. [more inside]
posted by Iris Gambol at 5:21 PM PST - 20 comments

Which Singers Have the Biggest Vocabularies? [Word Tips] [more inside]
posted by chavenet at 3:54 PM PST - 67 comments

PieceWork Magazine "celebrates the rich history of needlework and makers from around the globe". [more inside]
posted by paduasoy at 1:42 PM PST - 8 comments

Alien Dreams: An Emerging Art Scene. In recent months there has been a bit of an explosion in the AI generated art scene. Ever since OpenAI released the weights and code for their CLIP model, various hackers, artists, researchers, and deep learning enthusiasts have figured out how to utilize CLIP as a an effective “natural language steering wheel” for various generative models, allowing artists to create all sorts of interesting visual art merely by inputting some text – a caption, a poem, a lyric, a word – to one of these models.
posted by Cash4Lead at 12:54 PM PST - 47 comments

Surrounded by fires, parched by drought, and shut down by the pandemic – residents of California’s scenic South Lake Tahoe thought they’d endured everything. That was until this week, when the US Forest Service announced it was closing several popular sites after discovering bubonic plague in the chipmunk population. The Guardian's Erin McCormick reports on something that sounds terrible but maybe isn't a nightmare? As frightening as it sounds, plague in rodents at higher elevations is apparently not that rare, and a spokeswoman for the US Forest Service said spread to humans was easily preventable with a few precautions.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:59 AM PST - 58 comments