2024-03-03
Horseshit
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Willy Wonka experience: How did the viral sensation go so wrong?
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If You Can’t See That Adam Rubenstein Was Treated Unfairly, You’re Being A Jerk
the article wasn’t really about this one dumb chicken incident — in fact, Rubenstein proceeds to explain, in careful, dispassionate detail, how his career was permanently disrupted by a moral panic and the sloppy and inexcusable behavior of his own colleagues. So naturally, a bunch of journalists instantly claimed that Rubenstein was lying — of course this chicken event never happened. Michael Hobbes, who makes a very good living as a professional debunker despite having an accuracy batting average about equal to what my batting average would be in an actual Major League Baseball game, thundered: “Is anyone going to contact the Atlantic to ask them about the process behind publishing this egregiously fake anecdote[?]”
That was more or less the level of reasoning on display on Tuesday: I know this didn’t happen. How do I know? I just know. The problem was, Rubenstein had contemporaneously told a number of people about the sandwich event, including Levine and Bari Weiss, and they started coming forward to say so. This didn’t prove it happened, but it did seriously alter the factual contours of the story: for the story to be false, it would have to be the case that Rubenstein fabricated it, at the time, well before he was in any trouble at the Times, to a bunch of his friends. Why?
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The fascist simulation most recently spilled into reality on January 6th, when armed groups overwhelmed police forces and briefly occupied the capitol building only to (re)discover and (re)affirm that their power actually rests elsewhere. Rather than militantly attempt to seize state power as many feared they would, those who had stormed the building instead were reflexively and irresistibly drawn back towards the glowing screens of the networked devices that had organized and brought them all together in Washington in the first place. In fleeting states of mediated ecstasy, those running free in the capitol, armed with rifles and cell phones, spent their time urgently uploading videos from politicians’ hastily abandoned offices and staging meme-ready photos in evacuated congressional chambers, ultimately choosing the logic of the computer over the logic of the coup.
It desires only to multiply its networks, to subsume more and more data as a means of becoming more refined in its detail and commanding in its force. Whether coded as MAGA, QAnon, Blue Lives Matter, Proud Boys, or Militias, every encounter is interpreted and then enshrined as a confirmation and substantiation of the fascist simulation. Progressing as a networked machine that connects and parses the world according to fascism’s totalitarian logic, every militant demonstration, livestream event, campus debate, sponsored podcast, and media spectacle cultivates and sows the computational territories of the simulation, producing and instilling its own autonomous modes of reasoning and regimes of sensibility that ward off all contrasting forms of reason and sense.
- comment: "the article ... is about churches bombed into rubble in acts of cultural hate." The troll farms sometimes get their reference lists desync. Reads like a standard "MAGA bad" two minute hate to me; perhaps emitted from a more chemically enhanced, less coherent altitude than usual. LLM-spew should have better grammar.
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A.I. Is Making the Sexual Exploitation of Girls Even Worse - The New York Times
On Tuesday, Kat Tenbarge and Liz Kreutz of NBC News reported that several middle schoolers in Beverly Hills, Calif., were caught making and distributing fake naked photos of their peers: “School officials at Beverly Vista Middle School were made aware of the ‘A.I.-generated nude photos’ of students last week, the district superintendent said in a letter to parents. The superintendent told NBC News the photos included students’ faces superimposed onto nude bodies.”
I had heard about this kind of thing happening to high school girls, which is horrible enough. But the idea of such young children being dehumanized by their classmates, humiliated and sexualized in one of the places they’re supposed to feel safe, and knowing those images could be indelible and worldwide, turned my stomach.
Electric / Self Driving cars
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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Lawmakers across the U.S. seek to curb utility spending on politics and ads
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How the Government Used ‘Track F’ to Fund Censorship Tools: Report | The Epoch Times
according to the congressional report, Meedan’s Co-Insights Program uses AI to identify and counter “misinformation” on a massive scale. In one illustration that the group provided to NSF in its funding pitch, was to “crawl” more than 750,000 blogs and media articles on a daily basis for misinformation and fact-checking on themes such as “undermining trust in mainstream media,” “fear-mongering and anti-Black narratives,” and “weakening political participation.” The Co-Insights Program, according to the congressional report, was “part of a much larger, long-term goal by the nonprofit. As [Scott] Hale, the director of research at Meedan, explained in an email to NSF, in his ‘dream world,’ Big Tech would collect all of the censored content to enable ‘disinformation’ researchers to use that data to create ‘automated detection’ to censor any similar speech automatically.”
Trump / War against the Right / Jan6
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MTG rips GOP ‘hypocrites’ in abandoning Jan. 6 riot suspects - Washington Examiner
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Judge Fines Ex-Fox News Reporter for Not Revealing Sources (Archive)
The F.B.I. ended its investigation without bringing charges against Dr. Chen, a year before Ms. Herridge and her colleagues published and aired their reporting. In 2018, Dr. Chen sued the F.B.I. and other government agencies, accusing them of violating the Privacy Act by leaking information to Ms. Herridge. The Privacy Act has protections for personal information collected by federal agencies. Judge Cooper ruled last year that Ms. Herridge must reveal her confidential sources. On Thursday, he held her in civil contempt for disobeying that order. He said he had not issued the order lightly, deciding that Dr. Chen’s need for the information overcame Ms. Herridge’s First Amendment protections.
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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This Senate Panel On The Vaccines Is The Red Pill We've All Been Waiting For
A lot of work has gone into producing each of the vaccine panels he’s hosted. On Monday, he hosted “Federal Health Agencies and the COVID Cartel: What Are They Hiding?” When it was all said and done, I believe this panel was the most effective presentation I have seen for explaining what happened throughout COVID-19 and waking people up to how much they have been lied to. Because of this I strongly encourage you to watch or share his presentation with people who you think might be open to understanding exactly what was done to all of us.
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CDC ditches 5-day Covid isolation, argues Covid is becoming flu-like
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Scientist fired from Winnipeg disease lab intentionally worked to benefit China
Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation
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Google's Brave New Woke-AF World - by Andrew Sullivan
It’s not as if James Damore didn’t warn us. Remember Damore? He was the doe-eyed Silicon Valley nerd who dared to offer a critique of DEI at Google back in the summer of 2017. When a diversity program solicited feedback over the question of why 50 percent of Google’s engineers were not women, as social justice would surely mandate, he wrote a modest memo. He accepted that sexism had a part to play, and should be countered.
As Nate Silver notes, Google offers seven formal principles that guide Gemini AI, and the objective truth is not among them. The overriding goal is to be “socially beneficial” — which may, of course, require demoting or disappearing data, ideas or facts, if they might be deemed by some as socially non-beneficial. And the words of Page and Brin — “unbiased and objective” — have been replaced by a mandate to “avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias,” which is subtly different. It’s about ensuring that Google does not amplify existing bias in society, meaning sexism, racism, etc.
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Drop in Funding to Black-Founded Startups Greatly Outpaces Market Decline
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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I accidentally deleted a bad game revision from MAME
I had set out to fix a revision of the game in MAME, and make one more verison of it playable. Instead, I’d proven it didn’t exist in the first place. This wasn’t where I expected to end up, but it does teach an important lesson: corrupted data can go unnoticed for years if it’s not double and triple checked. And, more than that, it’s a reminder that databases are an eternal work in progress. MAME’s list of ROMs is also as close as there is to a global catalogue of arcade games and their revisions, but it’s still fallible. Databases grow and, sometimes, they shrink; proving a work doesn’t exist can be just as important as uncovering new works.
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GitHub struggles to keep up with automated malicious forks
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Just in time to push "Software Bill of Materials" and make sure only the Right People are invited to participate in Open Source.
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I'm not going to cryptographically sign my Git commits, and you shouldn't either
What I am actually trying to point out here is that it is useful to carefully consider how to avoid adding junk complexity to your systems. One area where junk tends to leak in to designs and to cultures particularly easily is in intimidating subjects like trust and safety, where it is easy to get anxious and convince ourselves that piling on more stuff is safer than leaving things simple.
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Rogue Editors Started a Competing Wikipedia That's Only About Roads
Despite minor disagreements, the US Roads Project mostly worked in harmony, but recently, a long-simmering debate over the website’s rules drove this community to the brink. Efforts at compromise fell apart. There was a schism, and in the fall of 2023, the editors packed up their articles and moved over to a website dedicated to roads and roads alone. It’s called AARoads, a promised land where the editors hope, at last, that they can find peace.
“Roads are a background piece. People drive on them every day, but they don’t give them much attention,” said editor Michael Gronseth, who goes by Imzadi1979 on Wikipedia, where he dedicated his work to Michigan highways, specifically. But a road has so much to offer if you look beyond the asphalt. It’s the nexus of history, geography, travel, and government, a seemingly perfect subject for the hyper-fixations of Wikipedia. “But there was a shift about a year ago,” Gronseth said. “More editors started telling us that what we’re doing isn’t important enough, and we should go work on more significant topics.”
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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My friend Steve, N8GNJ and the editor of the Zero Retries Newsletter has been pitching ideas lately about how to grow the amateur service. It’s admirable and ambitious, but I generally avoid this issue because a) I have no viable solution to offer, and b) I don’t believe anyone else has one either. When it comes to growing the amateur radio service, I’m a fatalist. I believe ham radio will shrink until it’s gone. Given that, looking for solutions are a waste of my time. I am willing, however, to discuss what I think are key questions that deserve more consideration, and one seriously fatal flaw in every single proposal I’ve seen when it comes to the matter of growing the amateur radio service.
- If I have something to say to the world; there are now many better, cheaper, easier ways to do so; that do not require arcane outdated rituals or Government Licensing to participate in. I have always been of the opinion that the FCC's licensing requirements clearly conflicted with the First Amendment. Fortunately technology outgrew government again, and rendered it irrelevant. Now we have to prevent the growth of the new Government efforts to control information dissemination. "Misinformation" and "Think of the Children" flags are being waved by those who wish to regulate what can be said today.
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
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Russia acknowledges continuing air leak from its segment of space station
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Space Accident Means Tardigrades May Have Contaminated the Moon
Unfortunately for the tardigrades, they can't overcome the lack of liquid water, oxygen and microalgae – they would never be able to reactivate, much less reproduce. Their colonising the Moon is thus impossible.
Economicon / Business / Finance
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Why small developers are getting squeezed out of the housing market
This brings us to the crux of the issue. Not everyone can execute a real estate development project. It’s risky, difficult, and requires a highly specialized skill set. Banks don’t fully know who will be able to execute at the onset of a project. The best they can do is to work with developers who have a long established track record. Even this is no guarantee of success. But it erects a fairly sizable barrier to entry for smaller, younger, or unproven outfits who don’t have any track record to speak of, to say nothing of a proven one. A catch-22 materializes. The only way to get financing from a bank is to have done projects before, but the only way to have done projects before is to have gotten support from a bank previously. It’s very difficult to enter this loop without having already been in it. It’s sort of like how employers ask for a year of work experience for a job that’s only courting recent graduates. How can you have a year of experience if no one is willing to give you the year of experience you require, because you don’t have a year of experience?
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US banks announce further 31 branch closures in just one week
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Super Micro joining S&P 500 after stock price soars more than 20-fold in 2 years
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
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New Jersey city that limited street parking hasn't had traffic deaths in 7 years
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Panera Is Not Exempted from California's Fast Food Minimum Wage Law After All
On February 28, Bloomberg reported that bakery chain Panera would be exempt from California’s AB1228, a law that raises the minimum wage for fast-food workers from $16 to $20 starting April 1. But now it looks like that may not be the case. On February 29, a spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom told the Los Angeles Times that Panera would not be exempt from the law. The spokesperson also denied a claim in the Bloomberg piece, which cited sources “close to the matter,” that Newsom pushed for an exemption that applies to businesses that bake bread and sell it as a standalone item — calling the report “absurd.”
Though AB1228 affects California as a whole, Los Angeles minimum wage is set to rise to $17.28 an hour on July 1, 2024, superseding the stateside $16 minimum.
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Conservatives on Twitter Send a Message to Leftists by Taking Over #WhiteRuralRage Hashtag
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Israel
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Hamas's entire politico-military strategy rests on its tunnels
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In other words, the Palestinians envy the Jews the Holocaust and seek to appropriate it and convince the world that the Jews are the real Nazis vis a vis the Palestinians who are today’s Jews. Then the Western leftists buy the Palestinians’ reframing and in turn envy Palestinian victimhood and sympathize with it. It’s victim envy all the way down.
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Gaza doctor: gunfire accounted for 80% of wounds from aid convoy bloodshed
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
Health / Medicine
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Go ahead and alter the atmosphere, no one's going to stop you – probably
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Asian elephants loudly mourn and bury their calves, Indian study finds
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Video show sharks, dolphins maul prawn trawler catch of Bundaberg fisher - ABC News
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The American revolt against green energy has begun
In a story filled with all the standard climate alarmist narratives, USA Today recently reported on the rising movement by local governments in the United States to refuse to permit unwanted wind and solar industrial sites in their jurisdictions.
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Climate change could spread geographical risk of getting parasitic worms