2022-04-19

Cool

• 131lb ‘He is a monster’: Mississippi man catches mega catfish | Fishing | The Guardian

Worthy

• Deceptively Aligned Mesa-Optimizers: It's Not Funny If I Have To Explain It

  But just as evolution eventually moved beyond mechanical insects and created mesa-optimizers like humans, so gradient descent could, in theory, move beyond mechanical AIs like cat-dog classifiers and create some kind of mesa-optimizer AI. If that happened, we wouldn’t know; right now most AIs are black boxes to their programmers. We would just notice that a certain program seemed faster or more adaptable than usual (or didn’t - there’s no law saying optimizers have to work better than instinct-executors, they’re just a different mind-design).

  • "right now most AIs are black boxes to their programmers." ... well, no; but that's the necessary precondition for the rest of the magical thinking about AI, so we'll just go with that, I guess.

etc

• Tesla Autopilot Stirs U.S. Alarm as 'Disaster Waiting to Happen'

• Mommies Who Mushroom

• Opinion: Another Species of Hominin May Still Be Alive | TS Digest | The Scientist

• Why have politics in the USA become so chaotic?

Horseshit

• Building American Dynamism

• Scientists hope to broadcast DNA and Earth's location for curious aliens

• Hologram doctors beamed to space station to visit astronauts

  The medical teams holoported to the station on Oct. 8. Using the Microsoft Hololens Kinect camera and a personal computer with custom Aexa software,

• The internet makes it easier to cooperate, that’s the problem

celebrity gossip

• Ex-Fox News Host Chris Wallace Having ‘Daily Breakdowns’ After Joining CNN

• EXCLUSIVE: The Real Reason Jared Kushner was Given $2 Billion to Invest by MBS

Musk / Twitter

• Twitter Has a Poison Pill Now

• Twitter employees slam ‘a–hole’ Elon Musk, ask whether he’s manipulating stock

• Elon Musk scrambling to find backers for Twitter takeover, sources say

• Elon Musk Should Create a New Kind of Common Carrier

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Big Media, Big Conflicts of Interest, Part 1: The Consolidation Craze & Illusion of Choice

  Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.

  • HN comments

• Accuracy is impossible anyway, so our errors are forgivable! Never Trust A Number - by Steve - Climateer

• What happens when a group of Fox News viewers watch CNN for a month?

• The Entire Planet Is Turning Far Right – and It Might Not Stop

• Is Twitter biased against conservatives? A Study | Hacker News

COVID / VaxCult

• What to consider when taking Pfizer’s COVID-19 pill Paxlovid: The drug can interact with many other medications but is still extremely effective in preventing severe COVID-19.

• Federal Judge throws out mask mandate for public transport in the US

• Yuval Harari: Covid is critical to legitimize total biometric surveillance

• Second Global COVID-19 Summit to Be Held May 12

• Supreme Court Rules Against Air Force Officer Who Refused Vaccine

• The Failed Covid Policy of Mask Mandates | City Journal

• About 30% of Covid patients develop 'Long Covid'

• Analysis: China's widening Covid curbs threaten global supply chain paralysis

• Masks now optional for employees, customers following White House announcement

• Most Major U.S. Airlines Drop Mask Mandates on Court Ruling

• I wonder why people thought they would be completely safe if they took the vaccines - American Thinker

• “Wearing a mask cleans nothing:” Florida judge vacates CDC travel mask mandate

• MTA, NJT Still Require Masks After Judge Voids CDC Mandate; Amtrak Drops Requirement

• Here's Why No One Wants to Talk About Sweden ⋆ Brownstone Institute

  He’d spent a large part of his life studying just that: where, when, and how people die. The way the world currently thought about death was, to him, completely alien. When he’d taken part in an online conference in Johannesburg, one participant had pointed out that, in that year alone, more than 2 million people had died of hunger in the world. During the same period, Covid-19 had claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 lives.

  From a human perspective, it was easy to understand why so many were reluctant to face the numbers from Sweden. For the inevitable conclusion must be that millions of people had been denied their freedom, and millions of children had had their education disrupted, all for nothing. Who would want to be complicit in that?

• Trump-Appointed Judge Deemed ‘Not Qualified’ by Bar Association Voids Mask Mandate on Planes, Other Travel

• Uber No Longer Requires Masks

• Masks Are Off - by Damon Krukowski - Dada Drummer Almanach

  There are clearly many, many more musicians out there experiencing the same. How could they not be? As Anton Newcombe wrote, after contracting his third case of COVID: “I am seriously skeptical that anyone can tour without 1 of 2 things happening: a) catching Covid b) ignoring it and creating super spreader events with the band.”

Culture War / Tribal / Re segregation

• Amazon to conduct racial-equity audit led by former Attorney General Lynch

• Scientific Nihilism - by Stuart Ritchie - Science Fictions

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• Most U.S. College Grads Don’t Work in the Field They Studied, Survey Finds

• Foundation gives Harvard $5 million to study ‘wealth inequality.’

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Washington Post is planning to dox the woman behind Libs of TikTok

  • They're Going After Her: Here's Why The Washington Post Will Doxx a Popular Conservative Account

  • Unreal: WaPo reporter claimed "severe PTSD" from Internet criticism -- and then doxxed an anonymous Twitter user – HotAir

  • WaPo’s Megan McArdle says woman behind Libs of Tik Tok getting doxxed isn’t really a big deal because she’s just an Orthodox Jew – twitchy.com

• How Marc Benioff is transforming Time magazine

• Executives at streaming services are having a change of heart about commercials Archive link

  “Never say never,” Spencer Neumann, Netflix’s chief financial officer, said last month about the possibility of advertising coming onto Netflix.

• Warner Bros. Discovery suspends all external marketing spend for CNN+

TechSuck

• DuckDuckGo ‘Restores’ Pirate Sites and Points to Bing as Culprit

• Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms

• Graphics cards are now within 12% of MSRP

• Cyberattack cripples Puerto Rico toll collection system

Crypto con games

• Leaked ‘Shill Price List’ Shows Wild World of Crypto Promos

• Is Dogecoin Racist? Dogecoin to Undergo Racial Audit by Government

• A16Z Crypto's Comment on SEC Exchange Act Proposal

• The complicated politics of crypto and Web3

• King of the ‘Lunatics’ Becomes Bitcoin’s Most-Watched Whale

• Axie Infinity’s financial mess started long before its $600M hack

Economicon / Business / Finance

• US home prices are rising so fast, property taxes can't keep up

• Canada bans foreign home buyers for two years

  • HN comments

• Target (corporate) goes hybrid permanently

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• Biden gets pulled away from reporters by aid in EASTER BUNNY costume | Daily Mail Online

• Psaki Won’t Apologize for Lying About Border Patrol Agents ‘Whipping’ Haitian Migrants

• The White House Sending Kamala Harris to Small Towns in Red States Is a Genius Political Move – RedState

• Elizabeth Warren: Democrats Can Avoid Disaster in November

• Democrats are campaigning on Jan. 6 hypocrisy.

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• Secret Service seizes more than $102M in crypto assets

• U.S. Detention of Child Migrants

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

• The Odds Of A Nuclear Deal With Iran Are Shrinking Every Day

• Oil From Biden's Emergency SPR Release Is Heading For Europe | ZeroHedge

• The tank is dead: long live the Javelin

  We should all recall the words of Australian Maj. Gen. Kathryn Toohey in 2019: “Tanks are like dinner jackets. You don’t need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.”

• United States commits to ending “reckless” anti-satellite missile testing

  • VP Kamala Harris: the US will halt tests of anti-satellite missiles

• What the hell is happening at BCT/AIT? : army

World

• EU Exhumes 18 Year Old Embezzlement Charges to Derail Le Pen Presidential Bid – Summit News

Health / Medicine

• Recreational marijuana access reduces demand for prescription drugs

• Lowering sodium intake doesn’t help heart patients

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Bird flu spreads to bald eagles as outbreak sweeps across US

• CO2 pipelines are coming. A pipeline safety expert says we’re not ready.

• We must ban boilers to force public to switch to £10k heat pumps

• The world’s coastal cities are sinking, but not for the reason you think

• Welcome to post-apocalyptic climate policy

Ukraine War

• Russian Ambassador To US Says Biden Officials Won't Speak With Him

etc

• Russia’s military is now on full display in Google Maps satellite view

  Thanks to former US President Donald Trump, we know that the 0.5 m per pixel resolution available on Google Maps' satellite view is a far cry from the images available to the US government.

  • (2019) US Spy Satellites at Diffraction Limit for Resolution Since 1971 | NextBigFuture.com

• Analysis: Chain of Negligence caused the loss of the Moskva cruiser

• Donbas: Why Russia is trying to encircle Ukraine's east

• Detailed Map of Russian Pipelines and Oil Fields

• Ukrainian identity solidified for 30 years. Putin ignored the science

• Russia Likely Has Local Air Superiority in Donbas, but It May Not Matter

• The Ukraine Is Still Losing So What Is Its Plan?

• Blinken Tells European Allies He Believes Ukraine War Will Last Through 2022

• NakedCapitalism (no other source cited)

  Russia MoD said over the weekend there had been about 8,100 Ukraine soldiers in Mariupol, way lower than previous independent guesstimates but in line with the # that defended Mosul, which took months to clear. MoD estimated remaining forces in the Azovstal factory at 2,100 tops. They were told to surrender by Sunday afternoon and if they left unarmed, they would not be killed. Ukraine did not comment. Russian side claims they intercepted many radio communications from inside asking to be allowed to surrender. Kiev allegedly said no and ordered Azov leaders to kill anyone who attempted to escape or even mentioned surrender. The started hitting the factory last evening with bombs, some of which observers thought might have included bunker busters.

• UK to revoke Moscow Stock Exchange’s recognised status

• How Ukraine Won the Battle for Kyiv

• "Battle Of Donbas" In Full Swing As Russia Launches 'Hellish' All-Out Assault