February 13, 2024

Agreed

Science (especially publically funded science) is one of the few things I have faith in..Poor Dr Fauci had such a hard time just trying to manage the pandemic like a decent public official.

Now stuff like this otoh (aka the Google/Meta style take on science is another ball of wax-Google certainly seems to produce a large number of creeps and crazies going by shit like this):
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/28/artificial-intelligence-god-anthony-levandowski

I generally like other scientists-a few nonsensical spats/miscommunications (probably as much my fault as theirs if not mostly my fault) aside. But these tech crazies are another matter.

AI god 🙄..as if all the deities already encumbering us are not bad enough.

February 13, 2024

This is who paid for the RFK Super Bowl Ad

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/politics/nicole-shanahan-rfk-super-bowl-ad.html



Okay..

Naomi Klein got it right about this weird syncretic shit between the new agey wellness types and the far right..but this is the first time I have seen one of those sleazy Stanford/Google/Musk network types overlapping with the RFK crazies. I thought this shit was more popular with the Joe Rogan types. I guess the binary imposed by the political system in the US is not adequate for the real world of human lunacy..

Naomi Klein got it right. If you have not seen her work on the doppelgänger mirror world you should definitely check it out:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/nov/15/naomi-klein-interview-wellness-culture-far-right

(Please buy her latest book Doppelgänger from your small, spunky, independent bookseller Amazon! This ad brought to you by Apple!)

I totally got exactly what she was talking about when I saw her latest stuff. I really wish they would leave the environment out of it. RFK is a boon to people who dislike environmentalists. That is what I think people like Naomi Klein find so irritating about getting confused with the anti vaxxers and similar “non-mainstream” crackpots.

And at least Klein has the wit to mock her own “brand” from what I have seen of her.

February 13, 2024

:)

Your cats are adorable and it is super cool how you do this

February 13, 2024

I hear you but...

But it is exhausting trying to entirely free of the sleazebags (I think evil is too grandiose a term for these conniving, low rent, second rate industries ruining the world. It gives them a sort of glamor-Star Wars! Darth Vader! When really it is just a bunch of environment and democracy destroying sweat shops; second rate surveillance capitalists etc).

I am finally deleting WhatsApp from my phone today after reluctantly having had it on my phone from August 2023 to today. It is a convenient little app, but the last thing I want contaminating my life is anything from those two sleazy and rapacious surveillance capitalists Google/Alpha and Facebook/Meta.

A vegan friend-one of the very few friends I have locally-had convinced me to try WA, but somehow found I could not use anything from Facebook or Google without dying a little on the inside . So I told her how I felt and she understood. She is an animal activist herself and so she is used to being at odds with society.

One of the few public figures I really admire is Lina Khan. I got tired of trying to live an Amazon/Microsoft free life. One can live without Google or Meta -at the end of the day it is just some tacky “convenience”.
Much harder to live without Amazon or Microsoft.

I have Stockholm Syndrome wrt Apple -I think it is partly Tim Cook..of all of those sleazy creeps (Zuckerberg, Nadella, Pichai, Larry Page etc etc) he is the best. At least he said something about how industry should not be “getting away with stuff”-a notion incomprehensible to those sleazy Google creeps.
And I did like their “Mind Your Own Business”ad.
I recognize it as Stockholm Syndrome wrt Apple though ..

Yasha Levine is usually right in all his tech criticism (including his takes on these sleazy “critics” of tech like Tristan Harris..Yasha has an excellent bullshit detector-he attacks self serving tech “criticism” in addition to sleazy tech..)
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/all-effd-up-levine

https://yasha.substack.com/p/shahid-buttar-the-cheesy-silicon

(And Shahid Buttar-the “leftist” who ran against Pelosi has also been accused of sexual harassment.)

https://yasha.substack.com/p/the-social-dilemma-nope-just-silicon

I have no patience with self important bullshit like The Social Dilemma or that Frances Haugen shit ..it is all such superficial bullshit. Real whistleblowers don’t get to do a little dog and pony show to gushing applause like Haugen did.-they go to jail like Charles Littlejohn/Daniel Hale or the Fannie Mae whistleblower.


But even so my email via my alma mater is Google made. So it is impossible to be entirely rid of these creeps..Even Yasha Levine, Ed Zitron and these few tech critics I do respect are on Substack-itself a part of that machine!

Where i live all sorts of small, creepy ai and data industries are probably flourishing. I hope more laws come up here strictly prohibiting data harvesting and use by small contracting firms as well as by large giants.

Those industries are corrupt to the core. I would really recommend Shoshana Zuboff’s “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”; Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley”; Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows” and Tim Wu’s “The Attention Merchants” to anyone interested.
And guess where I purchased those from? Amazon (Zuboff/Carr and Wu) and a local Walmart affiliate (Levine).

So many smaller sleazy companies also proliferate alongside the giant creeps-e.g. Cogito and Humanyze both originating from that sleazy Epstein associated MIT Media Lab. All their work is such superficial, TED tech talk worthy fluff to boot.…go try doing some real science you know..bloody frauds.

They are in some ways more worrying than the well known giants-there are so many of them-the NSO group, Black Cube etc etc.:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-espionage/the-black-cube-chronicles-the-double-agent

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/revealed-leak-uncovers-global-abuse-of-cyber-surveillance-weapon-nso-group-pegasus

These data and ai industries need stringent regulation globally. The Guardian did a great job with the Pegasus scandal.

In summary, if one lives in the world it is hard to not use some stuff sourced to creeps. One just has to try to minimize it as much as one can. I once read about these two schoolteachers in India who wanted to lead an exploitation free life..I really admired them. They walked the walk..they worked on this farm doing hard labor..it was very admirable. Also next to impossible…for all that I did admire them. But I am myself soft and flabbily complacent with my Netflix subscription and so on..oh well…


Added note: my own bullshit detector went off over this German “artist” who claims to be a tech critic and then pulled attention seeking stunts line these:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-02-04/man-creates-fake-traffic-jam-on-google-maps-by-carting-99-phones/11929136


I just find the tech creeps irritating, disgusting, sleazy and exasperating. But a lot of these so called tech critics are themselves attention seeking grifters. Here is a little hint- if a sleazy Googler is “impressed by the creativity” of your so called criticism instead of being pissed off, it is not real criticism. It is basically just an ad.
My own criticism of Google is that they are a creepy and worthless nuisance and I hope Lina Khan reams them and all the other creeps. Lina Khan is the real deal..these attention seeking types who claim to be “critics” are just bilking these sleazy industries themselves. Some of the more honest “critics” admit that they themselves exploit such situations. German “artist” my arse…bloody attention seeking grifter..

(God I am becoming so much more of an overtly cantankerous old curmudgeon as I age..I will soon attain the platonic ideal of being the person who disapproves of just about everything 🙄 and yells at real or imaginary “kids”/creeps to stay off their damn real or virtual lawn. Oh well..can’t fight innate instincts..I have to make sure not to turn my ire on innocuous random passersby just because …

Oh well that is why I try to be more mellow when creeps are not around raising my hackles which is rare )

I sometimes have second thoughts about rants like these against tech. The ceo class and some militant creeps aside, a lot of decent people (even some who are explicitly liberal and possibly members of forums like these) work in tech not particularly liking their employers, but it is just the state of the world..I wouldn’t want to inadvertent hurt the feelings of some poor Google techie who on the one hand hates Google and has to work there and otoh sees how much people despise giants like Google :-/. It is just a job for a lot of people. The brainless cheerleaders are a different story..screw those guys..

February 12, 2024

That part of the world is hopeless.nt

February 12, 2024

I rarely care much for any public figures but

She is the exception.

She sounds funny, cool and tough:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/27/us/politics/jean-carroll-trump-sexual-assault.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/nyregion/carroll-trump-rape-trial.html


There is nothing misogynists of a type like more than to take down a woman with sexual harassment or disrespect for daring to make raunchy jokes or live outside the purdah..There is always a distinct “she was definitely asking for it” vibe when men attack women of her specific type (aka funny and tough)..because they can count on a subset of other people piling on and saying “well look at the way she talks..what can she expect?”.

She cracks raunchy jokes or makes lewd remarks, she swears, she drinks..who is she to object to harassment? It is the misogynistic variant on the more common “she should not be wearing that if she doesn’t want unwanted attention”. I am very familiar with that line of sexist and backward thinking myself.

I love her. Go Jean! The anti-victim..

I hope Vagina T Fireball is the type of cat that will take an eye out of any creep who might try to attack her for daring to stand up to Trump. After his little “jokes” about assassination and presidential immunity I thought of her.

Anything a woman does (from posting on the net to swearing to raunchy jokes) is fair game for attack ..indeed having any sense of humor or fun at all is basically contraband in our increasingly regressive global society..really any behavior short of “hard work” and the obligatory 2 -10 kids is “asking for maltreatment”.

And I can say from personal experience that pretty much all of society looks on childfree women with contempt.

I am not surprised that Trump called her a “nutcase”.

People go out of their way to make childfree women miserable and then bullshit about how such women have “mental health issues”. It is sickening.

There was a time in a my life where I almost finally got browbeaten into thinking of myself as mentally not that well out of sheer tiredness. But now I know that not only am I not mentally ill, I never was unwell. I just was unfortunate enough to end up in the segments of society that do really hate women and call women crazy. My mental health is now and always was as fine as can be expected of any gaslighted and embattled woman surrounded by creepy men (not to mention the types of women who support them). The place I live is horrible-I am halfway around the world from your nazi rapist, but no shortage of male creeps where I live. The last 12 years were horrible, but I made it. I take full responsibility for my own actions always and defy creeps.

I like how spunky E Jean is. Attagirl..my mom would have loved her.

This is a society that wants women to be weak, depressive and so on. Though The New Atlantis is conservative, I did agree with this:

https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/all-pathology-all-the-time

I am not anti psychiatry, but I do think the tendency to call childfree women who know their own minds “crazy” has to be questioned. And by medical professionals above all.

February 12, 2024

I have yet to see this movie: The Zone of Interest

This thread reminded me of it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zone_of_Interest_(film)

Great post btw. I was trying to think of what it reminded me of..
Dream home next to Auschwitz

February 12, 2024

This is a great oped on scientific misconduct

https://www.nature.com/articles/494149a.pdf



I use it as a guideline for a paper I am currently working on as a follow-up to work I published a decade ago. I started this paper in the August of 2009 building a theoretical model for a paper I had just published.

There was never any misconduct in my published work/data submitted for grants or data presented at meetings by the common definitions of misconduct-i.e. no falsification/fabrication or plagiarism.

On the other hand was it work of a quality I would consider acceptable today? Definitely not in some cases. As I matured as a scientist I recognised more and more how subpar my work and even way of thinking about science are.


Explicitly speaking, the main issue I have with my old work is that I was a shirker where it came to instrument calibration.

I will have to see if peer reviewers and my former coauthors accept my explanation that the instrument I used was stable enough that neglecting to calibrate it with each experiment would not have caused errors of an order of magnitude such as to invalidate my results. Otoh it was definitely an unforgivably sloppy way of doing any experiment and I certainly don’t condone it.

I was always in such disarray that I was perpetually running behind on everything. I had some striking results that are still fine, but not having calibrated the instrument with every single experiment definitely worries me still.

I started the follow up research to understand the problem better shortly after publishing my main paper and thankfully this year I will finally be able to complete it and send it out.

At least the follow up work I have done is respectable enough that I am moderately happy with it.

I don’t get people like Diederich Stapel-what pleasure can there be in publishing bullshit?

I will definitely explicitly be saying in the follow up paper “the calibration curve is from this/this or this date. The instrument was not calibrated with every single experiment.”

I am posting this here because I think it is important that the general public have faith in publically funded scientific research because it is one of the few reliable things left in society.

The wrong way to go about doing open science (though very lucrative to surveillance capitalists) is this:
https://newrepublic.com/article/178268/surveillance-changing-intimate-relationships

If your scientists need to be monitored all the time to do the right thing your system is broken anyway.

Where I do disagree with Fanelli is the part where he says that scientists are not more honest than the general public. That could be so in lucrative industrial sciences. In my personal experience, the honesty of my colleagues has always been a big part of the reason I have striven to improve myself.

Most scientists I know even slightly are quite honest (I worked in academic science from around June 2001-July 2011..well technically June 2001 to April 2012, but I was burnt out and malfunctioning between Sept 2011 and April 2012). Then again they are all in the natural sciences and none of them really have any ties to industry, politics etc.

People get cynical with no one to look up to and that was definitely not the case with my colleagues or mentors. Otoh keeping up with them was always hard…Science is not for the faint hearted unless you have natural aptitude and or an excellent education. I doubt I have the natural aptitude part. But my education was decent enough once I went into the natural sciences (which again I did too late in life). I was originally an engineer-a boring and uninspiring field.

I will feel better once I submit this paper, because I consider it a basic obligation I have to publically funded science.

February 9, 2024

Thanks so much for my five hearts

whoever you all are.

February 6, 2024

Cast off regifts and these are super wealthy people

These people sound tacky and crass all the way from the big picture view to petty stuff.
I am doing well and will see check back again in a few months.
TTYL