Bálint 🎭 @szbalint@x0r.be

One of the worst thing online is nerds from two unethical multinationals dunking on each other. Just disgusting brown nosing.

(In this case Google employees taking potshots at Cloudflare’s hardware-key based CAPTCHA replacement. Just disgusting given Google’s anti-competitive behaviour with their captcha service)

But instead of these public figures shtick, it’s just two cuts of Tony Soprano:

1. “So uh, I got a ting I need you to do”

2. “Did you do the ting I asked you to do?”

https://twitter.com/smdiehl/status/1391313639878057992

ahem.

It was interesting how in the 1980s and 90s columbian drug cartels actually invested quite large amounts of money into new research areas
- accounting practices
- creative legal theories
- organized crime politics

Anyway.

Today cryptocurrencies are investing money into cryptoGRAPHY research and pushing the field forward in the same way. It's interesting, it's horrifying and it's driven in large parts by crime (specifically, fraud, embezzlement, and money laundering)

Like the J&J suspension case.

A lot of people tried to defend that decision on scientific grounds but ultimately it doesn’t matter. Society is not made of people reading systematic reviews in The Lancet. They sent a signal flare through that low bandwidth channel and this dented US vaccination willingness significantly.

It didn’t matter that J&J was later unsuspended. Suspension was telling people: “this is not safe” and you can’t uncommunicate that over a few weeks.

(Yes I’m subtooting Angie Rasmussen who is subtweeting Zeynep Tufekci in this specific example)

It’s perfectly okay to be a scientist in a STEM field and not be an expert in crisis communication and public health decisions. It’s a different set of skills.

Crisis comms is trying to get info across a low bandwidth channel under hostile conditions (noise and counter messaging), where the receiver makes their own decision about your message.

One of the less spoken aspects of the past year is that we had massive failures in public health, a large part due to a misunderstanding of the field.

It’s much closer to sociology and communications than to virology. And this continues to trip up numerous scientists.

Twitter is full of practicing virologists acting like nerd fan-fiction. Yes you are very good at STEM, but have this huge social sciences blind spot. And it is killing people.

It's very hard to fathom this moral vacuum. They can't imagine that the EU didn't try to stop vaccine exports and do "EU first" because it's the right thing to do? And would have wrecked supply chains?

....people's mask is literally slipping on covid, just like in the 1960s on "separate but equal" and on important issues of the day before that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/europe-covid-vaccine/2021/05/06/ecc4829a-ada5-11eb-82c1-896aca955bb9_story.html

"European policymakers also did not fully realize the extent to which barriers to vaccine exports out of the United States, Britain and India would put pressure on E.U. production to supply the world, leaving fewer doses to supply the Europeans themselves."

🤮 who writes a sentence like this but a total sociopath?

JFC, what's next - "haha soup kitchen, what idiots when they could just let people starve to death and collect free bodies for experiments"

If you're a journalist one of the worst crimes you can commit against your readers is to attempt to describe a graph with text.

People are not able to process text and construct a chart in their head for the most part.

sup folks

I’m tempted to get reddit premium just to avoid those fucking bitcoin ads.

One of the biggest unwritten stories today is the fact that the United States still refuses to export vaccines, when demand for it is already declining domestically, and the tens of millions of doses piling up include AstraZeneca which is not even approved in the US, so it's not used.

That this story isn't headline news in the anglosphere is such an indictment of our news infrastructure.

Let’s be very clear: Joe Biden is only welcome to visit Europe once the US starts exporting vaccines. And no, not to Europe: just alongside Europe’s 50% exports to the rest of the world.

Hi, I’d like to purchase the electric toothbrush your company makes, but before I’m ready to commit, could you please detail

- the SLI/SLOs for security updates and the minimum coverage period
- your security whitepaper on design level security hardening
- any and all applicable GDPR data collection compliance documentation
- the environmental impact studies and your lifecycle / recycling commitments
- your manufacturing audits regarding fair labour practices

Yours Sincerely,
Avg consumer

After the Cowspiracy/Seaspiracy “documentaries” - where they present real problems and then attempt to push the agenda that veganism is the solution to them, what’s the next topic?

I give you: Orbspiracy. The Kessler syndrome is real. More and more junk is building up in low earth orbit: and the only way to fix the problem is with veganism. Think about it - if people didn’t eat meat, we would have no need for telecommunication satellites, we would just live in small communes and talk to them!

Ok, so this is important, pay attention: if you see a sudden hard drive shortage that goes on for a couple of years and no natural disasters in hardware producing countries, then it means precisely one thing.

We have found a way to tap into the galactic quantum communications network. And it's full of 32k alien porn. We need to buffer the unimaginably large amounts of data to be able to filter out the alien smut and sample even a fraction of the useful data.