Rowley @Rowley@qoto.org

Publishing fake superconductivity claims should have faced more resistance.

"transgender people are going to destroy Christianity and the traditional American family"

yes, and we need to make faster work of it. chop, chop, everybody!

My takeaway from the SOTU tonight is this: a guy with a speech impediment delivered an hour+ long speech with a handful of stumbles.

Y’all — I’m in my late 30s, scored in the top 2% on board exams, got my first choice in the competitive EM residency match, and make dozens of rapid-fire life and death decisions every day that I work, and I routinely mess up the order of words in common phrases, confuse names, or misspeak a word. Biden is ancient, but his cognition seems pretty damn intact.

Something exceptionally grim is happening on the Internet.

In the last few months, the constant flood of algorithmically generated junk content has kicked into an AI-powered overdrive, and it is cutting a swath of destruction as it overwhelms search engines, filters, and moderation systems

Call it Gresham's Law 2.0: bad content drives out good.

I'm starting this thread to document it, because there is a *lot* happening all at once.

#greshamslaw20

this is one of the most violently unhinged CSB report i've ever read https://www.csb.gov/file.aspx?DocumentId=6120

@ai6yr @rustoleumlove I'm not sure I agree with the timescales there but fwiw I think this is one of the better things I've read about the different challenges we face (caveat: I'm not an expert in all of these fields) but it seems well researched and it's very well written - and by a famous investor no less. Which also makes it interesting

https://www.gmo.com/globalassets/articles/white-paper/2018/jg_morningstar_race-of-our-lives_8-18.pdf

It’s wild how fast I lost interest in space travel when it stopped being presented as a collective accomplishment and became a competition between a handful of morally bankrupt white men.

How much money do you think the United States has spent since 1945 on the Cold War? Sometimes they ask this question then from the back of the audience comes in answer ‘billions and billions‘. A huge underestimate – billions and billions. The amount of money that the United States has spent on the Cold War since 1945 is approximately 10 trillion dollars. Trillion, that’s the big one with the ‘T’. What could you buy with 10 trillion dollars? The answer is: You could buy everything in the United States except the land. Everything. Every building, truck, bus, car, boat, plane, pencil, baby’s diaper. Everything in the United States except the land, that’s what we have spent on the Cold War.

So, now let me ask: How certain was it that the Russians were going to invade? Was it 100% certain? Guess not since they never invaded. What if it was only let say 10% certain? What would advocates of big military buildup have said? We must be prudent. It’s not enough to count on only the most likely circumstance. If the worst happens and it’s really extremely dangerous for us we have to prepare for that. Remote contingencies if there is serious enough have the prepared for. It’s classic military thinking – you prepare for the worst case.

And so now, I ask my friends who are comfortable with that argument, including the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, why doesn’t that same argument apply to Global Warming. You don’t think it’s 100% likely? Fine. You are entitled to think that. If it’s only a small probability of it happening since the consequences are so serious, don’t you have to make some serious investment to prevent it or mitigate it? I think there’s a double standard of argument working and I don’t think we should permit it.

— Carl Sagan, An excerpt of a speech given on the 2nd of September in 1990 at the 5th Emerging Issues Forum at NCSU

Americans: Roe is settled law

SCOTUS: Nope—State’s rights means Roe is repealed

A: Absurd but at least states can remove insurrectionists from their ballot

SCOTUS: No—No State’s rights on this particular issue

A: But you Just said—

SCOTUS: How dare you doubt our legitimacy!?

#ExpandTheCourt

I just saw someone rant about "people writing shell scripts" and, no hard feelings, but I have yet to find a mainstream programming language that allows me to build streaming data pipelines as efficiently and effortlessly as a shell script.

Sure it's not typesafe and can be hard to read and it's easy to build a clever solution that you yourself won't be able to understand anymore in three months…

…and that's when it dawned on me that this is how Perl programmers must have felt 15 years ago.

This year, Russia has already

— threatened to use nuclear weapons against the west
— put the Estonian Prime Minister on their most wanted list
— gunned down a Russian defector who was living in Spain
— wiretapped the German airforce

Politicians may claim we are not at war with Russia, but clearly Russia is at war with us.

How many times does a Palestinian child have to condemn Hamas before they are considered human?

Finishing a PhD is reason to celebrate, but did you know there is a "Dance Your PhD" contest?

@Smithsonianmag reports this year's winner was a musical celebration of kangaroo behavior.

https://flip.it/D8Uw-0

For more stories from Smithsonian Magazine, follow "Science": @science-Smithsonianmag

#PhD #Academia #Research #Science #Dance

dear god please let trump try to escape bankruptcy by fleeing the US in a yacht that is quickly met by 6-10 orcas who have just done cocaine

I'm not gonna make it through this with my sanity intact. #media #fascism

I love that not one of the stories about #SanFrancisco citizens setting a #Waymo on fire last night mentions that three days ago, a Waymo hit a cyclist.

„Für alle, die den Unterschied nicht erkennen…“

Genialer Cartoon von Bruno Haberzettl

Just incredible that we're dealing with Comey redux. "He didn't commit a crime, but let me take a moment here to shit all over him and try to destroy his re-election campaign." Prosecutors charge or they don't charge. It was grotesquely unethical for Hur to slime Biden on his way out the door.

I am crying I am laughing so hard at the #AI generated colours from @janellecshane 's blog: https://www.aiweirdness.com/new-ai-paint-colors/