2025-01-09
LA on fire, secular clerisy, car software sucks, SamA accusations, much Meta backlash, Musk reads X, Linux gametops. long TOSLINK, conquering Canada, new Rasputins, EU fines EC, vintage Blue arsenic
etc
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A Rare Alignment of 7 Planets Is About to Take Place in the Sky
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On Priesthoods - by Scott Alexander - Astral Codex Ten
In the early days of the rationalist community, critics got very upset that we might be some kind of “individualists”. Rationality, they said, cannot be effectively pursued on one’s own. You need a group of people working together, arguing, checking each other’s mistakes, bouncing hypotheses off each other. For some reason it never occurred to these people that a group calling itself a rationalist community might be planning to do this. Maybe they thought any size smaller than the whole of society was doomed?
it becomes clear that such a priesthood is only useful insofar as it has some kind of barrier between itself and the general public. The priesthoods don’t exactly hate the public. But they hate the idea of letting the public’s ideas mix with their own. It’s not just that they discount the public’s ideas insofar as the public is less sophisticated than themselves. Their whole identity comes from their separation from the public. Ideas that seem too similar to the public’s get actively penalized, the same way it would be hard to convince Democrats to accept a plan that Donald Trump proposed first, even if it otherwise fit with Democratic ideals.
When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters. Consider how impressive a boundary this is - someone can have literally tens of thousands of fans for doing popular writing in a field, and the amount of extra status it gives them in the field is within a rounding error of zero. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.
Priesthoods have been politically easy to capture for at least a hundred years. Whole fields turned Marxist during the early-to-middle 20th century. Still, it seems like this reached an entirely new level during the 2010s. This isn’t just my subjective judgment; priesthoods themselves changed their bylaws or mission statements to declare political activism an integral part of their mission and condemned past incarnations for focusing on “objective” knowledge. Many priests who opposed the changes resigned in protest; their opponents defended themselves not by saying that nothing had changed, but by insisting that the changes were good.
The most obvious complaint you could possibly lodge against the priesthoods is that they’re “out of touch”. But its very obviousness should make it suspect. If you’re making an obvious complaint about a set of people much smarter than you, you should wonder why the much smarter people haven’t thought of the complaint themselves. The answer is often that they already have, that your having the complaint at all is downstream of them telling you to have it, and that you’re being used as a tool in some kind of internal conflict.
Horseshit
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Annual 'winners' for most egregious US healthcare profiteering announced
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'The internet hasn't made us bad, we were already like that'
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Car companies have an infuriating software problem
Software updates are also revenue opportunities in their own right. Accenture estimates that digital services could generate as much as $3.5tn annually for carmakers by the 2040s, or 40 per cent of all revenue, up from 3 per cent today. The possibilities range from upgrades to heated seats, self-parking to enabling drivers to purchase food, fuel or premium entertainment directly from the car. But that lucrative future will have to wait until auto groups master the art of seamless software updates. As my BMW’s visit to automotive purgatory shows, so far, that has eluded them.
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(2018) When the U.S. tried to replace migrant farmworkers with high schoolers
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Chick-Fil-A's Lemon-Squeezing Robots Are Saving 10k Hours of Work
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Problem gamblers' brains rely on slow learning, increasing losses: Study
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Financial stress in leaders harms team performance and morale
"The cost of leader personal financial insecurity: implications for adaptive team performance," found that leaders' financial stress spills over to affect how well their teams perform at work. "This occurs because when leaders are more stressed about money, they feel less in control, and then compensate for this at work by structuring their teams in a way that keeps more decision-making power for themselves instead of empowering their teams," said Spoelma.
The number one recommendation he made is to make sure employers are paying a living wage. Although New Mexico does have a higher minimum wage than several states, the minimum wage here only covers a fraction of what is considered a livable wage.
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Belgium's Food Agency Advises Against Eating Your Christmas Tree
celebrity gossip
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Sam Altman's sister accused him of sexual abuse in a new lawsuit
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Cyber luminary's neck injury accrues mammoth medical bill • The Register
Marc Rogers, DEF CON's head of security, faces tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills following an accident that left him with a broken neck and temporary quadriplegia. Speaking to The Register, Rogers confirmed his prognosis is good and he's now doing much better than he was three weeks ago when the incident, the nature of which he didn't detail, took place. Whatever the incident was, it left the cyber pro with a broken neck, but he wasn't aware of this at the time. He had no symptoms other than some "manageable neck pain," and nothing out of the ordinary showed up on a routine X-ray and an MRI wasn't possible due to insurance delays.
Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering
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"Meta created a LGBTQ exception for calling someone mentally ill as an insult"
Meta literally created a LGBTQ exception for calling someone mentally ill as an insult. You can't do it for any other group except LGBTQ people.
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Thread is a great demonstration of "its not hate when we do it"
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Meta's Fact-Checking Partners Say They Were 'Blindsided' by Decision to Axe Them
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Zuckerberg says he's moving Meta moderators to TX because CA seems too 'biased'
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Meta scrapped factcheckers because systems were 'too complex'
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No Fact-Checking and More Hate Speech: Meta Goes MAGA | WIRED
Since Donald Trump won back the presidency on November 5, a parade of Silicon Valley luminaries have been engaging in an unseemly grovel-fest, making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, shoveling million-dollar contributions to his inaugural fund, and meddling in the editorial departments of the publications they own in an apparent attempt to gain the new leader’s favor. Yesterday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “hold my beer.”
Mr. Zuckerberg is no longer apologizing. On Tuesday, he announced that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was ending its fact-checking program and getting back to its roots around free expression. The fact-checking system had led to “too much censorship,” he said. It was the latest step in a transformation of Mr. Zuckerberg. In recent years, the chief executive, now 40, has stepped away from his mea culpa approach to problems on his social platforms. Fed up with what has seemed at times to be unceasing criticism of his company, he has told executives close to him that he wants to return to his original thinking on free speech, which involves a lighter hand in content moderation. Mr. Zuckerberg has remolded Meta as he has made the shift. Gone is the CrowdTangle transparency tool, which allowed researchers, academics and journalists to monitor conspiracy theories and misinformation on Facebook. The company’s election integrity team, once trumpeted as a group of experts focused solely on issues around the vote, has been folded into a general integrity team. Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has promoted technology efforts at Meta, including its investments in the immersive world of the so-called metaverse and its focus on artificial intelligence.
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it wasn't happening, it was trivial and unimportant, now Zuck is the new Worst Person Ever for not continuing to repress Unapproved Thought.
Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners. “There’s a mountain of what could be checked, and we were grabbing what we could.” Mr. Brown said the group used Meta’s tools to submit fact-checks and followed Meta’s rules that prevented the group from fact-checking politicians. Meta ultimately decided how to respond to the fact-checks, adding warning labels, limiting the reach of some content or even removing the posts.
"This actually does an effective job revealing the problem with the fact-checking industry (perhaps by accident)," Reason senior editor Robby Soave observed. "Fact-checkers fact-check claim that fact-checkers are the problem. Real headline from the NY Times," civil liberties attorney Laura Powell noted. "How can anyone produce satire when the legacy media has become so ridiculous?" "This is amazing. Meta says fact-checkers were the problem Fact-checkers rule that false," Analytics Miami founder Ana Bozovic said in a post. "Rounding off the absurdity: this is the NYT reporting." "They really wrote this and then published it," senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Chris Rufo marveled. The Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Z. Hemingway wrote, "A beyond parody headline from propaganda outlet New York Times." "I had to look it up myself because I could not believe it wasn't parody," political columnist Moshe Hill wrote in surprise, "It's real."
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Facebook Is Censoring 404 Media Stories About Facebook's Censorship
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Facebook’s Fact-Checkers Changed the Way I See Tech—and Speech—Forever.
I had a data tracker on my screen that showed our web traffic, and I could see the green line for my story surging up and up. Then suddenly, for no reason, the green line dropped like a stone. No one was reading or sharing the piece. It was as though it had never existed at all. Seeing the story’s traffic plunge, I was stunned. I thought, How does that even happen? How does a story that thousands of people are reading and sharing suddenly just disappear?
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Social Media Has Ruined American Politics - by John Halpin
However, as the Founding Fathers well understood, the right to free speech also requires a great deal of personal responsibility on the part of American citizens. This means we shouldn’t use our free speech rights to incite violence, promote falsehoods, threaten people, or undermine the rights of others. The natural right to freedom of thought and speech that enamored America’s founders requires both legal protections and social norms that encourage citizens to use their legal rights wisely and with a serious focus on promoting the public good as well as their own personal beliefs.
- I'd bet this person has never heard of, much less read, any of the Anti-Federalist Papers.
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The International Fact-Checking Union (Yes That’s Real) Convenes An Emergency Meeting - modernity
Yes. there is such a thing as the International Fact-Checking Network. It’s made up of bodies like PolitiFact and Snopes, which have proven themselves to be completely partisan leftist ‘ministries of truth’, as well as legacy media outlets including the AP and Reuters who seem to spend much of their time ‘fact checking’ satirical articles.
Musk
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Elon Musk's Boring Company Is Building the Vegas Loop with Little Oversight
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Musk Vaulted to the Top of Diablo IV. Everyone's Asking Where He Found the Time
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EU Vows to 'Energetically' Pursue X Probe Under Digital Rulebook
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How a handful of X accounts took Elon Musk ‘down the rabbit hole’ on UK politics
Elon Musk’s recent obsession with UK politics is being fuelled by a series of popular accounts on his social media platform X, which the billionaire appears to be turning to for information on the grooming gangs scandal and Sir Keir Starmer’s track record as a prosecutor. An analysis of the entrepreneur’s feed by the Financial Times found that Musk — whose attacks on the British prime minister and senior politicians have become more scathing over the past week — has amplified or responded to a handful of X accounts that have posted extensively about the handling of historic sex crimes in the country. They include Viségrad 24 — an account with more than 1.2mn followers run by British-born Stefan Tompson — social media personality Mario Nawfal, and Malaysian influencer Ian Miles Cheong, alongside several less popular right-leaning accounts purportedly based in the UK.
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My Ban from X Is About One Thing: Elon Musk Controlling the Flow of Information
Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts
Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising
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Microsoft to Archive Unlicensed OneDrive Accounts This Month
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Valve will officially let you install SteamOS on other handhelds as of April
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Ham Operator Must Pay in First-Responder Interference Case
A ham radio operator in Idaho must pay a record $34,000 penalty for causing interference with communications during a fire suppression effort. When the commission issued its notice of liability 2-1/2 years ago, Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel wrote: “You can’t interfere with public safety communications. Full stop. So today we propose the largest fine of its type for this interference that put fire suppression and public safety itself at risk.” Frawley acknowledged that he operated on a frequency without authorization but argued that he did not interfere with government communications and was trying to help. He asked for a cancellation or reduction but the commission has rejected his appeal. It’s not clear why the FCC took so long to finalize the penalty.
The FCC said that in 2021, Frawley willfully and repeatedly operated without authorization and interfered with radio communications of the U.S. Forest Service, which was attempting to direct operations of fire suppression aircraft working a 1,000-acre wildfire on national forest land near Elk River, Idaho. The FCC said that over a two-day period, Frawley transmitted eight times without authorization on a frequency allocated to government use. The Forest Service complained about transmissions on 151.145 MHz. According to its case summary, the frequency is in the Public Safety Pool that was being used by the Forest Service and the Idaho Department of Lands to coordinate the firefighting.
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New questions on Stack Overflow are down 77% compared to 2022
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Silicon Valley homeless nonprofit sues Microsoft over disrupted email access
TechSuck / Geek Bait
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Counting the digits of 64-bit integers – Daniel Lemire's blog
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Building Ultra Long Range TOSLINK
Because TOSLINK is not intended to go very far, LEDs are typically used rather than lasers. That combined with the multimodal properties from the 1mm core puts the typical maximum TOSLINK cable length at 10 meters.
This method suggests a 720µs round trip time around the fiber, since that roughly calculates to ~143.2km, this aligns with the expected distance of the circuit! We did it! Given that the specified maximum distance for a TOSLINK cable is approximately 10 meters, this contraption has given us a 14600x range improvement over the standard setup!
AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World
Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO
Economicon / Business / Finance
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How Does Costco Sell 18-Year-Old Single Malt Scotch for $38?
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Microsoft is planning job cuts and focusing more on underperforming employees
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Job market tightens as openings surge; Fed grapples with rising inflation risks
- It's almost as if the newspipple are allowed to report negatively about the economy again.
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CFPB Sues Experian for Sham Investigations of Credit Report Errors
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Quantum stocks plunge after Nvidia's Huang says the computers are 20 years away
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US Justice Department accuses six major landlords of scheming to keep rents high
Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making
Trump
Left Angst
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Now Trump's import tariffs could raise the cost of a laptop for Americans by 68%
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Europe will not allow attacks, says France, after Trump Greenland threat
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The New Rasputins - The Atlantic
Anti-science mysticism is enabling autocracy around the globe.
When conspiracy theories and nonsense cures are widely accepted, the evidence-based concepts of guilt and criminality vanish quickly too.
Although Trump won reelection as a Republican, there was nothing traditionally “Republican” about proposing Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a former progressive Democrat with lifelong ties to the Science of Identity Foundation, a Hare Krishna breakaway sect. Like Carlson, she is also an apologist for the brutal Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and for the recently deposed dictator of Syria, Bashar al‑Assad, both of whose fantastical lies she has sometimes repeated.
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People Behind Project 2025 Want to Reveal the Identities of Wikipedia Editors
Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security
External Security / Militaria / Diplomania
World
Russia Bad / Ukraine War
China
Health / Medicine
Pox / COVID / BioTerror AgitProp
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Studying the promotion of health misinformation by the Bolsonaro government
On more than one occasion, for example, Bolsonaro confessed that he was “the only head of state in the world” to have gone against the main recommendations of experts and health authorities to prevent the spread of the disease, such as social distancing. At the same time, there is no shortage of examples of the times he encouraged people to gather in crowds, some of them at the worst moments of the pandemic in Brazil, when the country was recording thousands of deaths per day. These were events in which he also made clear his opposition to the use of masks, another fundamental non-pharmacological measure to try to control the spread of the virus. “By repeatedly saying that he was ‘the only head of state’ who was against these non-pharmacological measures and using this as a kind of ‘badge of honor’, Bolsonaro only gives more proof of his intention”, considers Lopes.
“Hydroxychloroquine, early treatment, herd immunity, people didn’t come up with these ideas alone,” she says. “Putting it all together, we have a very likely scenario of agnotological intentionality on the part of Bolsonaro, his government and supporters regarding the pandemic.”
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WHO Says Bird Flu Risk Low After 1st H5N1 Death In US | ZeroHedge (Archive)
The person who died in Louisiana had contracted H5N1 after exposure to wild birds, and a "non-commercial backyard flock," officials reported, adding that it's the only confirmed human case of H5N1 in the state.
Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda
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Carbon emissions of writing and illustrating are lower for AI than for humans
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Kangaroo will not wear condoms, no matter how you persuade them: Wildlife Fertility Control Technology
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Cold Spells May Persist Because of Warming, Not in Spite of It
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The toxic legacy of Agent Blue
Agent Orange’s use during the Vietnam War is well known. But the use of another herbicide during the war, known as Agent Blue, has remained largely unexplored. But one US researcher, who is a Vietnam Era veteran, is on a mission to raise awareness of this other so-called ‘rainbow’ arsenic-based herbicide that was used by the US military and its allies during the Vietnam War and the Second Indochina War.