Kris Sargent, MD @kristofor@qoto.org

The whole discussion about banning TikTok is incredibly frustrating to me, as it seems like a fairly blatant 1st Amendment violation that *also* completely destroy whatever (slight, and always mostly rhetorical) moral high ground the US had on this sort of thing: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/16/yes-the-us-government-threatening-to-block-tiktok-violates-the-1st-amendment/

1. Fox News' @JesseBWatters@twitter.com told millions of viewers that Silicon Valley Bank "donated $74 million to Black Lives Matter."

Similar claims went viral on Twitter

Some "facts" are too good to check

The actual amount that SVB donated to BLM is ZERO

Follow along for receipts 🧾

This was an actual argument made about reasons for the SVB failure in the Wall Street Journal. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/13/silicon-valley-bank-woke-right-wing/

Spotify: 25000 people listened to your album, we’ll never tell you who they are and how they found you! Here’s $1.74.

Bandcamp: 30 people bought your album and left a comment! Here’s $250.

The BBC confirming the revolution will not, in fact, be televised

Spend less time worrying about drag queens and more time worrying about youth pastors, boy scout leaders, and republican house speakers.

If you are discussing your abortion and you live in a place where abortion is now essentially illegal, please remember to speak only to people you trust and remember to use end-to-end encrypted comms with disappearing messages turned on.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/10/texas-abortion-lawsuit/

Reminder: Prior to 1982, stock buybacks were considered stock manipulation. It was Reagan's SEC that opened the floodgates to their abuse.

Stock buybacks don’t create more jobs. They don't increase wages. They don’t grow the economy.

They make corporate execs richer. Hello?

When Alaska rolled back its protections for LGBTQ people, it didn't send out a press release.

Instead, the state quietly announced the policy change via the social media feeds of its human rights commission.

The agency's Twitter and Facebook accounts had a total of 102 followers as of yesterday.

New, from @ProPublica & Anchorage Daily News:

https://www.propublica.org/article/alaska-drops-lgbtq-discrimination-ban?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=mastodon-post

#Alaska #LGBTQ #CivilRights #HumanRights #SCOTUS #Employment #Discrimination #Housing #Credit

These machines can do neither. They produce strings of tokens that statistically appear like they were produced by a human.

To an LLM the statements “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon” and “Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on Mars” are differentiated only in that more people have written the former than the latter.

That’s it.

AI doesn’t exist and companies letting what we DO have make decisions is just a way to avoid culpability for the results.

3/3

Cat with a Pearl earring- Urban Street Art
#Cats #CatsOfMastodon

#covid19 #virus #vax #weaponsofmassdestruction

The Department of Energy says they think SARS-CoV-2 escaped from a lab.

I think I'm going to wait to hear what the Postal Department says about it before I make up my mind...

(sarcasm)

if america ever gets nuked the headlines will say "Millions of workers didn't show up for work yesterday. Is No Call No Show the new standard?"

Esther Crawford, who proudly slept in the Twitter office to meet some arbitrary deadline Elon made up, has apparently been fired. I hope that some day people will understand that killing yourself for your employer is pointless.

@chancerydaily The Onion approaches chimpanzee typists about plan to develop an alternative to ChatGPT.

Blockchain was an interesting niche tech that was not good for anything practical but was hyped to the rafters by grifters and failed spectacularly.

Generative AI is the new interesting niche tech that's not good for anything practical but is being hyped to the rafters by grifters and will fail spectacularly.

When ordinary people just assume anyone in tech is full of shit, this is why.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about why there are so many less workers now than there were in '19.

Let me explain.
- A new sickness emerged.
- We ignored it for a while.
- We took it seriously for approximately 2 seconds.
- We let it rip.
- Lots of people died and are still dying.
- Lots more people became or are becoming disabled to mild or severe degrees, with no prognosis of recovery.
- We aren't sure what else will happen to the infected.

That's what happened and is still happening.