Itty53

Ancient. Technology.

That sounds a lot cooler than “civilizations have to do something with their poop”.

I think this is worse, arguably. Don’t get me wrong, Wakefield wasn’t good. But this is actually worse.

Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn’t care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.

So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.

This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there’s frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn’t saying any of that. It’s simply saying “here’s a reason not to trust climate science at all”. That’s the argument. That’s way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.

Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn’t take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.

This has big “I voted the general election in three states and then complained about voting security on Fox News” energy.

Had the same thought. Got sidetracked sniffing pens.

Jokes aside, any of y’all remember the scented markers for kids? Holy shit talk about grooming children for addictions. Whole classrooms of kids just sniffing chemical markers. The gas station rose vial of the kindergarten.

I’ll go one more, this format itself breeds contempt and arguments. There’s never going to be a “good old Reddit” because it was always a cesspool. I was there for ten years, believe me. It’s a cesspool. It’s because it’s shaped like one. The format is the problem.

deleted by creator

Block the user. By replying to him you’re spreading him through the fediverse.

Grain of salt, rather than skepticism.

No normal person can waste their time being truly skeptical of everything they see. The reality is we don’t have to (nor often do we) believe everything we see in normal situations. So take everything you see online, on TV, from afar with a grain of salt. Don’t put too much faith in it. Shit this is important even with actual real video footage, context can change everything. You get twenty seconds of a twenty minute video and you can make it say anything you want. Just cut the context to suit.

In situations where evidence counts, such as a court room, custody of that evidence is considered. Any old mp4 can’t be provided to the court as evidence without it being thrown out by the other team. So there really, truly is hardly any concern whatsoever about generative AI in the courts.

And the other side of that coin is confirmation bias. I don’t care how shitty the fake is, if you show a MAGA a video of Biden eating a baby that person will insist it’s real. Against any evidence to the contrary, they’ll argue its real and reality won’t matter.

That’s what’s been meant by the “post truth world”. It isn’t a problem of establishing what is and isn’t truth. The problem is that the truth doesn’t matter anymore.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/13/23637401/samsung-fake-moon-photos-ai-galaxy-s21-s23-ultra

Yeah this all smacks hard of a con then. You don’t publish except to get replication. That’s the entire point.

Publishing while being intentionally vague about replication is a huge red flag.

The legal reason for hearing it at all was whistleblower protections. That was what the committee was hearing about, were whistleblower protections actually violated? Watch AOC’s line of questioning, it’s extremely telling.

The committee exists to oversee exactly that law because the people who would violate it are government employees. The reality of his claims are irrelevant, and the validity of his claims is also irrelevant.

The questions are “did her feel he had a valid concern to report”, yes, and “did he report it through the appropriate channels” (we don’t really know, this was exactly the topic of AOC’s questions, and this made Grusch visibly nervous), and finally, “did he suffer duress from superiors for having made those duly obligated reports?”. The answer to the last one depends entirely on what those proper channels are. You do not have protections by simply going to the public. You have to inform superiors up the chain of command.

It all feels incredibly tailored to make Congress a media side show while carefully dodging culpability for doing so. The entire point of “well I didn’t see anything, people told me and I believed them” is just far too conveniently placed, the stories he has all fall in line with what the alien sub culture already had well established in their lore. Too too convenient. I believe AOC was on to that because while she’s smart, it doesn’t take a genius to figure this out.

I’m skeptical, but then I also understand that in the scheme of things, “room temperature” is arbitrary. So there’s no reason I know of that it can’t happen. It’s not like perpetual motion or something.

The irony of people posting on web applications they utilize for their own enjoyment, “applications don’t belong on web browsers” is killing me here.

There is a portion of the tech industry with their head stuck firmly up their ass and it seems a lot of em hang out in the fediverse. These people would demand we go back to party lines and manual switchboards. Techno-hipsters who are just angry at the next generation who took their BBS internet and actually made the world use it.

Downvote me, that’s fine. Use that interactivity application on your browser. Go be the very definition of irony. Please.

Ketchup packets, but flipped in the 4th dimension.

Harris could easily be the most unpopular VP only because she pisses off both sides. To the right she’s a black woman and that’s plenty to hate her. To the left, she’s a statist cop who put plenty of poor people in jail over tiny drug crimes. As the DA of San Francisco and AG of California she played a typical neoliberal role: executing conservative policies with flowery liberal verbiage.

Progressives don’t like her and the DNC doesn’t listen to their progressives often. She’s definitely a sore spot.

Imagine having the time to actually look at all that nonsense just to find out who clicked an arrow icon halfway around the world.

I don’t think people really understand just how privileged it is to be here dawdling at all, given time, technology, access, etc … nevermind dawdling maliciously over something so petty.

Then again you could easily make bots to check all that shit, do the cross referencing, and pump out a black list of folks you don’t want to interact with. I can see there’s a lot of use in that for moderation and administration, but as a user? Begging for problems. It won’t ever create positivity to have people able to see that. I understand the protocol won’t hide it, but apps can.

Edit, Wait, I’m not even sure the protocol allows for downvotes anyway, that’s specific to the apps isn’t it? So there’s a conscious decision going on to show them? That’s a miss.

By positing it as the reality and not just a reality that we can actually change, you’re playing defense for em. You’re using their talking points.

BTW You don’t have to be debating the finer points of morality to be doing something immoral. Corporatists don’t debate morality either. Because they know they lose, every time. Hint hint.

No that’s what got us here. Profit above all else brought us where we are, it can’t bring us back. Apologies for being blunt but that’s a stupid thought you shared.

At this point doing something that you’re unsure whether it will make things better or worse is literally a better option than just nothing. I mean really what’s the worst thing that happens? The equivalent of an oil spill? Like that’s ever stopped us from doing things for profit? Why should we hold ourselves to these “better be entirely certain” standards when we never held ourselves to that standard on the way here?

This is a legitimate train of thought. “This might hurt things but I’m not sure how” simply isn’t good enough. Give me a reason to be afraid to use this. Cause we’re not afraid of using oil yet. Fuck it let’s put a bunch of iron in the oceans. Really can’t hurt things any worse than we have, can it?