Daira-Emma Hopwood

@daira.bsky.social

815 Followers 401 Following

Zcash's official load-bearing catgirl. The only good fascist is a dead fascist. How to pronounce my name: 'dɜːɹə 'ɛmə 'hɔ́pwʉd

An instance of the "No, it's the children who are wrong" Simpson's meme. In the top panel, Principal Skinner is asking "Are we the baddies?", with superimposed images of 5 authors with awful politics: J K Rowling, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, Dr Seuss, and Orson Scott Card. The last of these includes a quote from Ender's Game to illustrate the point about these authors' deficit of self-awareness: "We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams." In the bottom panel, Skinner is saying "No, it's the children who are wrong."
A black-and-white photograph of the Hindenburg disaster. An enormous fireball erupts from the rear of a huge airship behind a black mooring tower, with burning debris raining down onto the buildings and vehicles below. The back third of the airship is in flames.
A famous soviet-era poster by Alexander Rodchenko. It shows a black-and-white image of a woman (Lilya Brik) shouting the Russian for "books!", against a bold red, green, and blue background forming the shape of a megaphone.
Headline "Palantir Is Helping DOGE With a Massive IRS Data Project" Palantir, the software company cofounded by Peter Thiel, is part of an effort by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to build a new "mega API" for accessing Internal Revenue Service records, IRS sources tell WIRED.
Screenshot of a Guardian article on 12th March 2025 by Jeanette Winterton. Lede: "I think of AI as alternative intelligence – and its capacity to be ‘other’ is just what the human race needs" ChatGPT firm reveals AI model that is ‘good at creative writing’ ‘A machine-shaped hand’: Read a story from OpenAI’s new creative writing model "I think of AI as alternative intelligence. John McCarthy’s 1956 definition of artificial (distinct from natural) intelligence is old fashioned in a world where most things are either artificial or unnatural. Ultraprocessed food, flying, web-dating, fabrics, make your own list. Physicist and AI commentator, Max Tegmark, told the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February, that he prefers “autonomous intelligence”. I prefer “alternative” because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be “other” is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war."
Stephen Judkins (@stephenjudkins.bsky.social): "There was a very popular post this morning claiming that Democrats will never stand up for trans rights, and then this afternoon every single Senate Democrat indeed stood up for trans rights. Maybe go easy on the dooming and performative dunking on Democrats?"
Slide titled "Testosterone" Testosterone is an androgen that is converted to dihydrotestosterone (DHT) by, as discussed in the previous slide, 5-α reductase. DHT is a much more potent androgen than testosterone is directly. The perception of testosterone is politically charged; it is frequently blamed for all kinds of societal ills — essentially any bad thing that people associate with men can be, and often is, attributed to testosterone. In the popular (and TERF) imagination, testosterone makes you aggressive and scary-strong and confers magical advantage in sports. This is a biological essentialist viewpoint disconnected from reality: no hormone actually works like that. FTM Resource Guide has a discussion of such myths written from a transmasc perspective. This feeds into widespread misconceptions about T’s safety profile and to it being classified as a controlled substance. To some extent, toned down versions of these misconceptions are common also within the trans community. I want to be very clear about how bad the standard of discourse about T is outside specifically transmasc communities. The common standard of evidence for talking about negative side effects of testosterone isn’t very much better than “making shit up”, and this unfortunately extends to some clinicians.
Google search for "mass of a nitrogen molecule in eV/c^2". "AI Overview The mass of a nitrogen molecule in eV/c^2 is approximately 9.31 x 10^3 eV/c^2."
Screenshot of the explanation. "Conversion factor: To convert mass to eV, you use the equation E = mc^2, where c is the speed of light. [correct] Nitrogen molecule mass: A nitrogen molecule has a molecular mass of roughly 28.0134 atomic mass units (amu). [correct] Calculation: Since 1 amu is equivalent to 931.5 MeV/c^2 [correct], the mass of a nitrogen molecule in eV is (28.0134 amu) * (931.5 MeV/c^2) / (1 amu) [correct] which is approximately 28.0134 eV/c^2 [wrong, it failed to do the calculation it said was necessary]. Key points: * This value represents the mass of a single nitrogen molecule. * The "c^2" in the unit indicates that the mass is being converted to its energy equivalent using the speed of light squared."
A Google search for "mass of a nitrogen molecule in eV". The "AI Overview" answer starts "The mass of a nitrogen molecule (N2) is approximately 28.0134 eV/c^2 when expressed in electron volts (eV)." On the right is a snippet from the NIST WebBook correctly giving the molecular weight of N2 as 28.0134 atomic mass units (not the same thing as eV/c^2).
A slide titled "Estradiol": The form of estrogen used in HRT is called estradiol (“E2”). It is usually taken in the form of estradiol valerate (“EV”) for pills or patches, or either EV or estradiol cypionate (“EC”) for injections. It is metabolized to the two other forms of estrogen, estrone and estriol, in the liver. Estrone would be too weak for use directly in HRT and estriol is not licensed to be used for it. There is a systematic problem with undertreatment using estradiol. GPs and endos are terrified of the stuff and are very likely to undertreat you unless you push back. I’ve seen so many transfems suffering dysphoria due to undertreatment, or unnecessary side effects as a result. Because there is a lot of individual variability in the response to a given dose, you really need blood test results to tell you the resulting serum level. Your E2 serum level should be in the range 100–200 pg/mL (367–734 pmol/L). Reference: Endocrine treatment of gender-dysphoric/gender-incongruent persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline [Hembree, Cohen-Kettenis, Gooren, Hannema et al 2017] The safest forms of E2 for HRT are EV patches or EV/EC injections. As previously mentioned, patches and injections result in greater bioavailability than pills. In the case of EV this reduces the needed dose from between 4 mg/day and 8 mg/day for pills taken orally, to between 100 mcg/day and 200 mcg/day for patches (rated absorption for a patch worn continuously and fully in contact with the skin). 100 mcg is 0.1 mg, so you can see the huge difference (roughly a factor of 40) that the greater bioavailability makes. For injections, 2 mg/week would be typical, so the average dose over time is roughly on the same order as for patches (285 mcg/day of EC in that case, although EV and EC doses are not quite comparable).
Photo of me in an altered state. I'm in bed with a lovely smile, tightly cuddling Blåhaj and Rainbow Dash plushies and petting our cat, Marco.
Research suggests that weight stigma is prevalent in healthcare settings and can affect treatment quality. For example: In a 2021 study, 66% of people who reported experiencing weight stigma also experienced it from healthcare professionals. In a 2022 study involving almost 1,700 people in Israel, 48% of people with a body mass index (BMI) higher than 25 reported suboptimal healthcare treatment. In the same 2022 study, more than 50% of the participants reported that healthcare professionals had made judgmental and insensitive comments. Older studies cited in a 2019 research review found that healthcare professionals spend less time with people with obesity during office visits. The results of a 2003 studyTrusted Source suggest that healthcare professionals’ weight bias affects their ability to offer empathy and support to people with obesity, which can affect the quality of their treatment. According to a 2019 review, healthcare professionals’ weight bias can deter people with obesity from seeking healthcare.
Slide titled "End all gatekeeping" Your right to transition is not theirs to place conditions on. It never has been, for any trans person, and it never will be. No-one’s right to healthcare is theirs to place conditions on. It never has been, for any person, and it never will be. Gatekeeping is a fundamentally illegitimate and unjust practice. It is based in prejudice, and it reinforces cis supremacy, white supremacy, and ableism. I want to be very clear: *gatekeeping is discrimination*. It is a stain on society that should shame the medical profession. “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” —Emma Lazarus, 1883.
Patients with a BMI of 35.3 or greater were less than half as likely to die within 30 days of surgery (over a range of surgeries that included riskier ones than typical gender-affirming ones) than those with a BMI of 23.1 or less. ['The Relationship Between Body Mass Index and 30-Day Mortality Risk, by Principal Surgical Procedure', Turrentine, Hanks, Stirmer et al, 2012.] For reference, 18.3 to 24.9 is often described as the "healthy range", 25 to 29 as "overweight", and above that as "obese", so this is saying that to the extent that there is a correlation between BMI and short-term surgery risk, it's a negative correlation even within the supposed "healthy range". The negative correlation between BMI and mortality after surgery is so well-established that some researchers have given it a name: the "obesity paradox". The only "paradox" here is that the evidence provides no excuses for continuing to practice medical fatphobia. Using high BMI as a contraindication to surgery, as GICs are still doing, is neither scientifically nor ethically supportable. Using low BMI wouldn't be either, of course. But we can be 100% sure that the NHS BMI threshold is pure fatphobia.
Slide from "Chemistry, Politics, Transphobia" titled "Transphobic gatekeeping amplifies health risks (14/14 – fatphobia)". It reads: The settled scientific consensus is that BMI is unacceptable bullshit. It is an "inaccurate measure of body fat content and does not take into account muscle mass, bone density, overall body composition, and racial and sex differences." ['Why BMI is inaccurate and misleading', Christian Nordquist, Medical News Today, January 2022.] Even if it actually measured body fat content, no matter what technical fixes were made to it — it would still be unethical to use it for gatekeeping. A research team at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, found *better* post-surgical short-term survival rates among people with obesity than patients of "normal" weight. ... Alt text continues in next skeet.
Similar image to the one above, but the woman is blonde, her bra is black and magenta rather than black, and the thought bubble says "I make *never being enough* look easy..."
Comic pane showing a red-haired woman with mascara and bright red lipstick, wearing a bra and lying back in bed with her arms folded behind her head. A thought bubble says, "I lay awake at night... My tits are too nice for my life to be like this..."
Screenshot of a one-star review of the Bluesky app by me on Google Play, about to be submitted. The comment reads: "It is unacceptable for Bluesky Social to throw trans users and other minorities under the bus by refusing to enforce its Community Guidelines. A notorious transphobe and literal pedophile-apologist was, by deliberate management decision, allowed to remain on Bluesky despite incontrovertible evidence of his harassment of many users; stated intent to harass more; posting screenshots with private medical information of trans children; and linking his own articles attempting to normalize pedophilia."
9 Acknowledgements The inventors of Zerocash are Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Christina Garman, Matthew Green, Ian Miers, Eran Tromer, and Madars Virza. The designers of the Zcash protocol are the Zerocash inventors and also Daira-Emma Hopwood, Sean Bowe, Jack Grigg, Simon Liu, Taylor Hornby, Nathan Wilcox, Zooko Wilcox, Jay Graber, Eirik Ogilvie-Wigley, Ariel Gabizon, George Tankersley, Ying Tong Lai, Kris Nuttycombe, Jack Gavigan, Steven Smith, and Greg Pfeil. The Equihash proof-of-work algorithm was designed by Alex Biryukov and Dmitry Khovratovich. The authors would like to thank everyone with whom they have discussed the Zerocash and Zcash protocol designs; in addition to the preceding, this includes Mike Perry, isis agora lovecruft, Leif Ryge, Andrew Miller, Ben Blaxill, Samantha Hulsey, Alex Balducci, Jake Tarren, Solar Designer, Ling Ren, John Tromp, Paige Peterson, jl777, Alison Stevenson, Maureen Walsh, Filippo Valsorda, Zaki Manian, Kexin Hu, Brian Warner, Mary Maller, Michael Dixon, Andrew Poelstra, Benjamin Winston, Josh Cincinnati, Kobi Gurkan, Weikeng Chen, Henry de Valence, Deirdre Connolly, Chelsea Komlo, Zancas Wilcox, Jane Lusby, teor, Izaak Meckler, Zac Williamson, Vitalik Buterin, Jakub Zalewski, Oana Ciobotaru, Andre Serrano, Brad Miller, Charlie O’Keefe, David Campbell, Elena Giralt, Francisco Gindre, Joseph Van Geffen, Josh Swihart, Kevin Gorham, Larry Ruane, Marshall Gaucher, Ryan Taylor, Sasha Meyer, Conrado Gouvêa, Aditya Bharadwaj, Andrew Arnott, Arya, Andrea Kobrlova, Lukas Korba, Honza Rychnovský, and no doubt others. We would also like to thank the designers and developers of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Core. Zcash has benefited from security audits performed by NCC Group, Coinspect, Least Authority, Mary Maller, Kudelski Security, QEDIT, and Trail of Bits. We also thank Mary Maller for her work on reviewing the security proofs for Halo 2 (any remaining errors are ours). [this is about a quarter of the acknowledgements]
Still from Dawn of the Dead (1978). The four main protagonists (Francine, Steven/"Flyboy", Peter, and Roger) are sitting on a bench in front of railings overlooking a mall courtyard. Francine is holding a rifle and the others are wearing ammo belts around their necks. Roger's forearm and leg are bandaged. They look very tired.
Quote: "The abstraction of transgender interests from transition into a fight for generic existence and rights also sustains frustratingly hollow claims to political action. It's not surprising that representation in corporate entertainment, euphemistic appeals to poetry, art, or the aestheticization of everyday life as beautiful have become venerated refrains in recent years, as if they were genuine political defiance. (The apotheosis is now surely the fully-memed trope of "trans joy.") They are disaggregated, private victories as distant as possible from the life-changing material effects of not being able to obtain hormones and surgeries, a driver of downward mobility. Because transgender culture since the 1990s had been virulently anti-transition, to the point of celebrating that "you don't have to transition to be trans," it has unfortunately found itself without strong resources to meaningfully oppose the attack on medical transition, which is a bread and butter, material concern, the stuff of class politics, not self-affirmation, idealised care, or representation."
STOP DOING LIGHT MODE * Computers were not supposed to burn out your retinas. * DECADES of the “desktop metaphor” yet NO REAL-WORLD USE found for having computer screens look like a desk painted Dulux Pure Brilliant White™. * Wanted to light up your parents’ basement anyway? We had a TOOL for that. It was called a TORCH. * “Yes turn on all the pixels and then turn off just the ones that convey information.” — Statements dreamed up by the utterly incompetent. LOOK at what Tech Bros have been demanding your Respect for all this time: Three screenshots all with bright white backgrounds: * a crowded Windows 3.1 desktop showing Program Manager; * the Accessibility settings menu on an Android phone (the text below "Colour inversion" says "May affect performance"); * an early version of Netscape Navigator showing the "Welcome to Netscape" page and "Netscape Security Upgrade Available". (This is REAL user interface design, done by REAL UI designers.) “Hello I would like a small power station to run my laptop please.” (emphasized) They have played us for absolute fools.
A proof of Pythagoras' theorem using only basic trigonometry and the identity "sin² theta = 1 - cos² theta". It has a drawing of a right-angled triangle with a vertical side of length a, horizontal side b, and hypotenuse c. The angle opposite to 'a' is theta. We essentially write "a = b tan theta" and "c cos theta = b", square the latter, use the identity to get "b² (1 - cos² theta) = a² cos² theta" and substitute to get "c² cos² theta - b² cos² theta = a² cos² theta", then divide through by cos² theta and handle the degenerate case cos theta = 0 separately. Not the most elegant proof but it works.
Screenshot from a mobile browser of an Internet Archive page with "Fab" in large red-on-white letters filling the screen.
Screenshot of my profile, to which I've added "Zcash's official load-bearing catgirl". That's circled in purple added to the screenshot, along with cat ears on my pfp. Below are Kris' skeet and another from alice (@__justplaying) saying "what i'm learning today is that bluesky has a lot of great crypto people"
Say that I have a friend who can’t get medication, because, say they’re trans —and this is a very real example— they’re trans, and getting hormones is illegal in wherever they are, or is gatekept by waiting lists that are years long. [aside] And by the way, those restrictions are just transphobia. There’s no medical justification for them. [end aside] And so, if you can’t do these things —that might be disapproved by authority, but are actually perfectly ethical and the right thing to do— because you fear the consequences? Then that leads to a worse society.
Privacy allows people to think freely. There’s the space inside your head, where you can basically think whatever you want, and [jokingly] be fairly confident that no one is reading your mind — [serious] that you can reason about the world and reason about what should happen in the world. But then, once you’ve done that, once you’ve come to some conclusions, you need to discuss them with your friends. Because maybe you’re wrong. Maybe they’ll have a viewpoint that you haven’t considered. And when you do that, how can you have the same confidence that that discussion won’t be used against you, if you can’t do it privately? Financial transactions are relevant to this because, if you don’t have financial privacy, then you don’t have privacy.
Tweet by Zinnia Jones (@ZJemptv): "In her speech at Genspect's Lisbon conference, Sex Matters' Helen Joyce pitched an explicit plan to use bans on puberty pausers as the starting point for a cascade of restrictions leading to all-ages bathroom bans: https://archive.ph/1XZqT" The tweet screenshots a transphobic screed by Joyce that ends by calling the UK ban on puberty blockers "a rhetorical and argumentative device" to argue for restrictions on trans women (who it misgenders as "men") accessing women's toilets at work and in public places.
daira@katava:~/Android/platform-tools$ ./adb push com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk /sdcard/com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk: 1 file pushed, 0 skipped. 81.4 MB/s (16212034 bytes in 0.190s) daira@katava:~/Android/platform-tools$ ./adb shell pm install -r -d /sdcard/com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk avc: denied { read } for scontext=u:r:system_server:s0 tcontext=u:object_r:fuse:s0 tclass=file permissive=0 System server has no access to read file context u:object_r:fuse:s0 (from path /sdcard/com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk, context u:r:system_server:s0) Error: Unable to open file: /sdcard/com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk Consider using a file under /data/local/tmp/ Error: Can't open file: /sdcard/com.google.android.apps.authenticator2_6.0-6006000_minAPI19.apk
Linked arms meme: Trekkies and anarchists agree "no heroes".
Screenshot of an Android app storage tab for Google Authenticator 7.0. Space used: App size 18.15 MB User data 369 kB Cache 332 kB Total 18.85 MB
Crop of the previous image to just below the neckline. It shows a very pretty femboy blushing and looking shyly(?) to their left. Their blonde hair is fully covering the right side of their face and they are wearing a choker and a strappy top. The Bluesky "Adult Content" banner is visible at the top of the screenshot even though nothing in the image is *overtly* adult content.
Photo of an antique Wheatstone Bridge in a wooden box.
Of deaths due to trauma, 35% occur at 24 to 48 hours after injury. The "cause of death" is most commonly "neurologic dysfunction". But the *originating* cause is the trauma. It is very likely that what has happened here is that the police department have misinterpreted a technical finding of cause of death secondary to the trauma itself. In a sensitive case of a potential hate crime, it's irresponsible and misleading to present this kind of technical finding to a lay audience as "the decedent did not die as a result of trauma". Without a competent interpretation of the full autopsy results and the MRI results from the previous day, we don't know, but it is inevitable that this kind of oversimplification will be seized on by anti-trans reactionaries.
Naga and Korra from "The Legend of Korra". They look like they're in no mood for any bullshit.
A screenshot of the parent skeet with "1337 likes" ("leet") circled in purple.