Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.

Sorry for the repost. This site like to delete things you write? Or something went wrong when I update the entry. If I remember correctly it's not the first time the combination a video and updating went wrong. Seems to be an old bug. (Since this is about AI, one can ask if a AI can't fix the bug.)

At best this entry could be a draft to an article about how to use AI and algorithms to create. The title might also be correct. Except one could discuses if I am geeky? Ok, if I'm lucky it's not boring either. Also note that it's about me learning, not about me being an expert.  But to start. One literature history example of using algorithms to create was the Oulipo group in post war French. And maybe the most famous example from that group was when Georges Perec wrote a novel without using the letter "e". That said my first example, is an example that needs some coding. I just learned about using Markov Chains (MC) for finding patterns in genomes. One search engineer search later I know that you can use MC for predictive text. So I took code from this site and trained the algorithm on the two most worn poetry books I have, both of which happen to be in English: Cathy Park Hong's Engine Empire and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. (FWIW, I like Hong's book, but I don't understand the greatness of The Waste Land.)



Engine Empire also includes some Ouilpi things: Ballad in A, respective Ballad in O. Both poems written with, lets say, a restricted numbers of vocals:

O Boomtown’s got lots of sordor:
Odd horrors of throwdowns,
bold cowboys lock horns,
forlorn hobos plot to rob pots of gold,
loco mobs drool for blood,
howl or hoot for cottonwood blooms,
throng to hood crooks to strong wood posts.
So don’t confront hotbloods,
[...]








From the preticted text:

Market forces are brighter than the sun beats, And the dry stone no sound of water.
A storm raged for a moment a broken Coriolanus Da Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the clouds, haunted by a weekend at the Metropole.
Here is the man who I used to chirp at each other like demented birds.
Then a damp gust Bringing rain Ganga was sunken, and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the mountains Which are mountains of tinted tallow trees and pars graced with stately flame throated birds-of-paradise.


Could I write poetry from that? I like the word "beats" showing up:

Beats, market forces were brighter than the summer sun
now, the beats are winter
No beats of water, dry stone,
Storm Beats, to the clouds, haunted
birds-of-paradise, while Ganga was sunken
and the icy road without the beats of sand


Second example. If you read the above, I can reward you with some AI slope. Is AI slope helped by having a background story? Ok, AI videos are one clear example of people like me being able to produce things we could not before. If I ever produce a real article, I might not need three examples, but here I am going to post three AI videos with backstories. One backstory from literature history, one from sci-fi, and one from STEM.

The STEM example first. Last autumn Nobel Prize avoided Emmanuelle Charpentier was made a honorary citizen in my home town. I found it charming that she said the snow up here creaked: "Crispr, Crispr" under her shoes. My old biochemistry book merely described Crispr as a bacteria immune system, but yeah Crispr for Gene editing was what Charpentier shared the prize for. Anyway, I going to assume one, back in the day, needed to be an old fashioned nerd, who could hyper focus on coding, to make a video with snowflakes and the word Crispr. Not today.


I mentioned Perec, his debute novel was named: Things a story of the sixties. Inspired by that I one time wrote a poem named: Things a story of the 90s*. A poem with included the line: "The older generation said: 'All you need is love' Central Peak Café style". To do this you used to need to hire actors.



The third video. I wanted to see the creatures from Remembrance of earth's past/Three body problem by Liu Cixin finding the planet Solaris from the book with the same name by Stanisław Lem. To do this you used to need more money and more knowledge about CGI.



At last, if I want to be quite ambitious the end project could be to fine tune a transformer to add rhythm to my poetry. I want it to be in Swedish, meaning I could use the Swedish AutoModel, & AutoTokenizer, or whatever it's called, from the royal library in Stockholm. And since I mentioned transformers, it wasn't until last autumn I learned that the "t" in "chatgpt" stood for "transformers": "generative pre-trained transformers".





* One poem I send to four papers and got rejected four times.

** Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. That the p stands for palindrome actually gives and excuse to point out that palindrome was used by the Ouilpi group as well.

Post scriptum, I used youtube, but I thought about peertube. Actually, I used to have a peertube account, but it has been deactivated. Possible since I haven't logged in, in years. At the end of the day, I'm still using less US tech than I used to.

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!