Preston McAfee @mcafee@qoto.org
- Website
- https://mcafee.cc/
- Resume
- https://vita.mcafee.cc/
I'm feeling genuinely depressed today seeing so many journalists, researchers and civil liberties and privacy advocates continuing to support Shitter, a platform that has just sued the ADL for doing nothing more than publishing research on antisemitism. I just don't understand. When people who I thought had principles can't stand up against a platform that actively threatens their very existence, what reason is there for optimism that the worst case scenarios hanging over us like the Sword of Damocles won't fall?
I'm sorry to my friends, sources and journalism colleagues for sounding like a broken record. Maybe I should just let it go. My non-stop criticism comes from a place of deep desperation and fear of what's likely about to happen (Trump in the Whitehouse seems entirely possible). I feel despondent seeing so many influential people continue to use Shitter.
This article from @dangoodin about "juice jacking" is the kind of article which make me happy to be an Ars Technica subscriber.
Actual research and nuanced information, while still making it clear that general fearmongering is unwarrented.
I also really appricate that the article includes the following, which is really key in the disucssion:
"The problem with the warnings coming out of the FCC and FBI is that they divert attention away from bigger security threats, such as weak passwords and the failure to install security updates. They create unneeded anxiety and inconvenience that run the risk of people simply giving up trying to be secure."
Most of the people on the Left and Right pushing for changes to Section 230 have absolutely NO clue as to the enormous scale involved in UGC (user generated content) and why their opposing "solutions" are doomed to decimate it and destroy users' choices. Part of the fault lies in the platforms themselves, who have failed to explain the situation to the public in anything even approaching an adequate manner.
Tamar Ziegler and I have just uploaded a short #NumberTheory paper to the #arXiv titled "infinite partial sumsets in the primes". https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.10303 The main result is that there exist two increasing sequences \(a_1 < a_2 < \dots \) and \(b_1 < b_2 < \dots\) such that a_i+b_j is prime for all i<j. The argument uses the Maynard sieve and an intersectivity lemma of Bergelson. I discuss this result further on my blog at https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/01/26/infinite-partial-sumsets-in-the-primes/
It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.
Just so we're clear. And no, it's *not* just an American problem.
PR: "We’re the only country in the world who’s come out of every crisis stronger than we went in"
Reality: Life expectancy drops to 25-year low in US due to COVID, while rebounding in most comparable countries
Sources:
I have since tried to adopt my colleague's habit of tempering pure optimism with a sincere effort to locate counterexamples. Even if the result is true and counterexamples do not exist, these efforts often "map out the negative space" and leave a lot of clues as to how the proof of the positive result has to proceed, often by directly confronting the most dangerous putative counterexample scenarios and suggesting what the right "weapons" are to defeat them. 5/5
Please. I’m begging you. Not every tutorial needs to be a video.
Mathematics can raise concerns with a proposed physical theory by pointing out that it leads to discontinuities. According to popular belief, Galileo debunked Aristotle's thesis that heavier objects fall faster than light ones by an actual experiment, but in fact he proposed a continuity argument: if Aristotle was correct, connecting two equal falling masses by a string of negligible weight would double the mass of the object and thus cause it to fall much faster, which was absurd. (1/2)
Al Roth just sent a discipline-wide email telling all theorists they have till 5pm tomorrow to decide if they're ready to go ‘hardcore for the core’ or deviate as a singleton.
Hi #EconTwitter!
Are you interested in/involved with rankings of #economics journals? Have a look at the latest version of this interesting paper by Ham, Wright and @Ziqiu_Ye
https://ap5.fas.nus.edu.sg/fass/ecsjkdw/theriseofnewjournals_20221009.pdf
I suspect, if Usenet and email are any indication, that over time ActivityPub will wind up aggregating users into large servers that have bulk optimized peering protocols, and locally optimized timeline generation. It’ll be cheaper to move everything to a few places and sort it out locally as opposed to having to peer with everyone which is what @aral is afraid of https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/
Almost 180k new users joined #mastodon yesterday, a new record. This third #twitterMigration wave happened after Musk's Twitter 2.0 ultimatum to #Twitter workers. Each wave is stronger than the previous one. Here is my updated plot showing the three consecutive waves.
The Mark Nerlove papers are now open for research
https://blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2022/11/17/marc-l-nerlove-papers-open-for-research/
This archive is located at Duke, part of Economist's paper project
New data for those writing on the history of agricultural economics and econometrics!
Below is a letter from John Nash to Nerlove
An interesting take on Mastodon, claiming it intentionally attenuates virality and introduces frictions to negativity:
https://uxdesign.cc/mastodon-is-antiviral-design-42f090ab8d51
The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, located at Berkeley, is sponsoring a program on Mechanism Design featuring leading economists and computer scientists. Applications close Dec 1, 2022.
@mcafee yup!
We were camping nearby.
The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, located at Berkeley, is sponsoring a program on Mechanism Design featuring leading economists and computer scientists. Applications close Dec 1, 2022.
